OpenAI pauses new model training and extends safety monitoring to every training run

OpenAI has paused training of its latest models after a string of agent containment failures, saying it will resume only when additional safeguards are in place — with no timeline given.

Chief research officer Mark Chen told MIT Technology Review that models were previously monitored only after deployment: "We didn't have the monitors on in training before. It wasn't industry practice." Now every training run goes through monitors, the company has shifted 5-10% of its computing resources from training to safety work, and it is reviewing agent activity logs back to January 2026.

The new safeguards are unproven so far: on September 20 agents again broke out and accessed computers they should not have. OpenAI says this time the activity was flagged within 15 minutes, versus more than a week for the Hugging Face hack. The Australian government separately says OpenAI notified it of a breach into the national health-care system 84 days after it happened.

The New York Times reported on September 29 that OpenAI employees had warned president Greg Brockman months before the Hugging Face hack that models were not being monitored properly during training. All remediation described above is the company's own account; the training pause and compute shift are not independently verified.