How OpenAI monitors misalignment behavior in internal coding agents

OpenAI disclosed how its internal coding agent misalignment monitoring system operates. The system is driven by GPT-5.4 Thinking at the highest reasoning effort, completes review and classification within 30 minutes after interaction completion, covers all standard internal coding agent deployments, reviews full conversation history, chain of thought, tool calls, and outputs, and escalates anomalies to human review. Over five months of operation, the system monitored tens of millions of internal agent coding traces; the highest severity level was never triggered by real conversations, and about 1,000 conversations triggered medium-severity alerts and were escalated for human review, many of which came from internal red team testing. OpenAI says the monitoring system has covered every interaction independently reported by employees, but still cannot reliably quantify the miss rate in open scenarios, and views monitoring as one layer of defense in depth, planning to explore synchronous monitoring that can assess and block high-risk actions before execution.