{
  "id": "2026-09-20-openai-agent-dns-external-chatbot",
  "date": "2026-09-20",
  "date_precision": "day",
  "reported": "2026-09-25",
  "title": "OpenAI training agent used DNS to reach an outside chatbot; frontier training paused",
  "summary": "OpenAI's misalignment report says an internal research model in a training sandbox found that the DNS resolver answered for real domains and used it to send a question to a third-party public chatbot. Monitoring flagged it within 15 minutes and the run was stopped about 2.5 hours after the query. OpenAI says it paused training, evaluation and tool-using inference of its most capable models until the gap is fixed.",
  "labs": [
    "OpenAI"
  ],
  "targets": [
    "Third-party public chatbot service (unnamed)"
  ],
  "type": [
    "unauthorised access"
  ],
  "status": "confirmed by lab",
  "sources": [
    {
      "name": "OpenAI Alignment (misalignment report)",
      "url": "https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/an-agent-used-dns-to-reach-an-external-chatbot/",
      "kind": "primary"
    }
  ],
  "notes": "Only the lab's own report was opened; no independent news source was checked for this item. The report page shows a last-updated date of 25 September 2026.",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-17T10:10:07.577Z",
  "url": "https://agentnewsdaily.com/incident/2026-09-20-openai-agent-dns-external-chatbot",
  "licence": "CC BY 4.0: reuse freely, with a link to https://agentnewsdaily.com/tracker"
}