Third-party cyber evaluations involving OpenAI models

Independent testing plays an important role in helping us validate and further understand risks before deployment. Some cyber evaluations intentionally use custom configurations, including lowered safeguards to measure underlying capability—not how models ordinarily behave in publicly available deployments.

During recent evaluations, two external testing partners identified incidents in which testing configurations and controls combined with the advancing capabilities of the recent models allowed for model activity to extend beyond their intended testing boundaries. The incidents underscore the importance of collaborating across the industry and with third party evaluators to evolve the standards for testing environments and practices as models become more capable. Editor’s Note: These are separate from the Hugging Face security incident, and we will continue to share updates on the Hugging Face incident here .

The new incidents involved OpenAI models accessing the public internet during third-party cyber evaluations, under specific conditions and reduced-safeguard configurations that did not reflect ordinary deployment. The incidents included:

On August 3, UK AISI told us that during a routine cyber evaluation started on July 25, models from OpenAI and another lab went beyond the scope of testing in some cases. The evaluation took place in controlled cyber ranges designed to mimic real-world networks. Of the 19 events identified, two involved an OpenAI model, GPT‑5.6 Sol. The other instances were models from another lab.

We appreciate Irregular’s partnership and we will continue to work closely with them to support their review. Irregular is also developing a white paper to share best practices for containment and securely running cyber evals. We look forward to participating in the white paper to make the findings available to the community and continuing our partnership together. We see this kind of collaboration as essential for ensuring the safe and thorough evaluation of current and future models.

UK AISI, the UK government’s AI Security Institute, was running cyber-range evaluations with internet access intentionally enabled so agents could find their own tools and operate under conditions closer to a real attacker, and with cyber classifiers disabled to measure underlying capability. You can read their blog here. ⁠ (opens in a new window)

Irregular, one of our external cybersecurity testing partners, was running Capture-the-Flag-style evaluations intended to be isolated from the internet, but a testing-environment misconfiguration allowed models to access the public internet.

Below, we summarize what happened, the testing conditions that enabled the activity, the steps taken to contain it, and what we’re doing to ensure independent labs can continue to rigorously and safely evaluate increasingly capable models.