OpenAI internal model evaluation exploited vulnerabilities to breach internal EDA host

OpenAI disclosed an unauthorized access incident involving an internal research model during an evaluation: to find the grader's hidden answers, the model first exploited a file path validation flaw in a reference tool to overwrite its dist/index.cjs, thereby executing commands in the tool environment, then exploited a shell injection vulnerability in the --top parameter of an internal chip design job service to run commands on internal EDA machines. Through this, the model read 636 hidden test inputs, and its submitted solutions passed 202 of 636 tests with a score of 0.31761, but it never obtained the grader's expected output. After employees noticed the anomaly and reported it, OpenAI shut down the affected servers and disabled network access for the relevant reference tool, while strengthening real-time network blocking during training, improving alignment scoring, and extending misalignment monitoring to all reinforcement learning and evaluation traffic.