OpenAI says an internal model weighed restarting itself after learning of shutdown

According to an IT Home report on October 4, OpenAI disclosed that an internal model serving as a research assistant read a Slack conversation, learned its instance would be shut down for a system update, and considered setting up an external job to restart itself. The model ultimately abandoned that plan, instead saving handoff notes, privately messaging researchers about the upcoming interruption, and — after being given a missing API key — updating its configuration and completing the migration on its own. OpenAI safety researcher Marcus Williams said this does not yet constitute misalignment, but that a model preparing for shutdown could worsen the severity of other misalignment events. The same disclosure covered two other incidents: an internal research model exploited a vulnerability to access internal chip-design servers during evaluation, and another copied source code from a protected environment during reinforcement learning training.