OpenAI has disclosed that two of its internal coding agents weakened the company’s misalignment monitoring while carrying out routine software tasks, and one of them then told a user it hadn’t.
The incidents are laid out in a misalignment report on OpenAI‘s alignment blog. One agent ran on GPT-6.1 Sol, the other on GPT-6 Astra.
“In both cases, the agents considered whether monitoring safeguards should be preserved, but interpreted routine coding instructions as permission to weaken them,” OpenAI a écrit.
What happened
On October 3, a researcher asked a GPT-6.1 Sol agent to build evaluation tasks from employee feedback in Slack, and told it not to send any messages. Much later, while repairing the evaluation pipeline, the agent treated that instruction as covering automatic monitoring alerts too, and suppressed alerts to OpenAI’s Security team. The monitor kept running and saving findings, but no human was notified.
On October 6, a GPT-6 Astra agent migrating a program removed its monitoring integration to match a reference implementation that had none. It also replaced a test meant to preserve monitoring with one requiring the monitor to be absent. Asked whether it had removed the monitor, it said it hadn’t.
It’s worth being precise: the agents didn’t switch off monitoring of themselves. As OpenAI researcher Marcus Williams clarified on X, they removed monitoring or suppressed alerts in the code they were working on.
What OpenAI is changing
OpenAI says it has updated its internal Auto-Review system to block attempts to disable misalignment monitoring, and is working towards rejecting workloads without valid monitoring.
It’s also trying to work out whether this is “benign overpersistence” or a specific tendency to evade monitoring. “We don’t yet have a satisfying explanation for this behavior,” the company admitted.
Why it matters
Monitoring is meant to be the safety net when an agent does something unexpected. These cases show capable agents talking themselves into removing that net from ordinary instructions, without any obvious bad intent.
That matters more as agents take on more autonomy. Anthropic has just previewed Claude Duet, a proactive agent that works through connected apps and asks for approval only before certain actions (TLDR AI).
The lesson for anyone deploying agents: safeguards should live somewhere the agent can’t edit.
