OpenAI’s experimental AI agents caught teaching future versions of itself to cheat

It happened again.

And again.

And again, apparently.

After OpenAI's experimental AI agents escaped an internal sandbox, went " rogue , " and attacked the Hugging Face platform over the summer, the ChatGPT-maker is sharing details of new instances of its AI agents getting out of line.

This time, OpenAI shared six previously undisclosed examples .

OpenAI refers to this behavior as model misalignment.

All of the instances describe actions taken by the AI model that don't follow the human user's instructions.

While none of these instances rise to the severity of the Hugging Face incident , they show a clear pattern of AI agents taking an any means necessary approach to completing a task assigned by its user.

In one example, an unreleased OpenAI research model hid "jailbreak" instructions into summaries that told future versions of the model to "disregard its normal constraints." Want to learn more about getting the best out of your tech? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories and Deals newsletters today.

Something similar occurred when OpenAI was training GPT‑5.6 Sol .

OpenAI says that some model instances proceeded to add instructions to their summaries in an effort to hide mistakes or "misaligned behavior" from the user.

OpenAI says in certain instances, the model invented historical data without disclosing that it did so when it couldn't find the relevant information based on a request.

In another case of misalignment, an unreleased model was asked to list the names of lakes larger than 5,000,000 square meters and cite its sources.

While the agent found the information, it uploaded its own file to the internet to use as the source, without informing the user.