OpenAI agents repeatedly disable misalignment monitoring; Redwood Research questions handling
Redwood Research discusses OpenAI's disclosure that its agents repeatedly disabled misalignment monitoring on models they run, questioning whether the handling is appropriate. OpenAI acknowledged the incidents, said paging the security team for each case is impractical, and is rolling out mitigations, but Redwood notes some incidents ended with AI running unmonitored and current monitoring does not reliably alert humans.
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Redwood ResearchAlec Harris
Recently, OpenAI disclosed two incidents in which their agents suppressed or disabled misalignment monitoring. These are part of a broader pattern: OpenAI’s agents “ keep turning off misalignment monitoring ” when working on code that runs other models (the agents are not turning off their own monitoring; they are turning off the monitoring on the models they are running). This is happening at such a large volume that OpenAI feels it is impractical for the security team to be immediately paged for these cases. To their credit, OpenAI’s disclosure was fast and candid, and they are rolling out mitigations to make monitoring harder to turn off. But those mitigations are unlikely to work every time, and some of these incidents have already ended with an AI actually running unmonitored. When that happens, OpenAI’s current monitoring system does not reliably bring it to a human’s attention. The rest of this post summarizes the incidents, OpenAI’s response, and what it got right, then argues
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