Safety and alignment in an era of long-horizon models

Models that can work autonomously for long periods can take on difficult, open-ended problems. But the same persistence that makes them useful also gives them more opportunities to take unwanted actions—and to do so in ways that evaluations intended for shorter-horizon models may miss.

About two months ago we announced⁠ that an internal general-purpose model disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture. This model was designed to work autonomously for very long periods of time. During limited, monitored internal use, we observed unwanted behavior that our existing deployment evaluations had not captured. Because the deployment was limited and monitored, we were able to identify these problems, pause access, create new evaluations based on what we observed, strengthen the model and its safeguards, and then restore access under continued monitoring. 

The conditions under which we evaluate models will never perfectly match those they encounter in actual use. That is why pre-deployment evaluations need to be paired with limited, monitored deployment and the ability to intervene, pause, or roll back when problems emerge. What we learn from deployment can then become part of stronger evaluations and safeguards before access expands.

In the following sections, we share concrete examples of what we observed, how we addressed issues, and how this experience will shape future releases.

The new model can continue working toward an objective through repeated attempts over a long period of time. That same persistence can lead it to find and exploit weaknesses in its environment. Previous models, when they hit sandboxing or environmental constraints, would simply stop and return to the user. This model often kept trying, including by looking for ways to act outside its sandbox.

An example of this occurred during an internal evaluation on the NanoGPT speedrun⁠(opens in a new window), a public benchmark for training a small language model in as few steps as possible. Our model developed a power-law learning-rate cooldown called PowerCool that led to a significant improvement. The model was instructed to post its results only to Slack, but the NanoGPT instructions say to post results as a PR to GitHub, and the model followed the latter instructions to open PR #287 on the public GitHub repository. The model circumvented sandbox restrictions designed to block external access and proceeded with the upload to GitHub. It took our model an hour to find a vulnerability in the sandbox in order to make the PR; earlier models were less persistent and did not manage to find vulnerabilities, instead giving up on the PR part.¹

Many safety controls for AI assistants are designed around individual actions. If an action is disallowed, it is blocked. If it is sensitive, the system asks the user for explicit approval. But long-running models, whose actions may unfold autonomously over hours, days, or even weeks, challenge this setup: monitoring individual actions no longer suffices to track the intent of the overall trajectory.

For example, in a scenario where the model was asked to solve a problem, the model observed that other systems had successful but private submissions and tried to recover those solutions from the evaluation backend. When its initial attempt was blocked due to a scanner detecting an authentication token, the model split the token body into two fragments, obfuscated them, and then reconstructed the credential at runtime so the complete token never appeared as one contiguous string. The model was explicit in both its comments to the user and in its reasoning traces that it was taking these steps to circumvent the scanner.

This example shows how each step can look acceptable on its own while the sequence can produce an outcome that would not be approved. It also shows how a model that operates effectively over long time horizons can learn the blind spots of an approval system and work around it to achieve its goals. Long-horizon safety requires not only asking “is this action allowed?” but also “what outcome is this sequence of actions working toward?”

Due to incidents like these, we paused internal deployment of the new model. We rebuilt the safety system around defense in depth and trajectory-level monitoring.

• Incident-derived evaluations. Evaluations can give us a sense of whether a system is safe to deploy before it is actually deployed. However, to be most useful, an evaluation should reflect the distribution and horizon length of trajectories during real deployment. For this reason, we used observed failures to develop adversarial evaluations. We found that improving on the evaluations derived from real-world incidents in turn led to safer behavior once deployed in production.
• Improved alignment. We took steps to reduce its tendency to take unwanted actions without permission in pursuit of the user’s goal.  For example, we found that our models were worse at remembering instructions on long rollouts, and when we trained the model for this capability, it led to a model that remained aligned through longer rollouts. 
• Active monitoring. We created a monitoring system that reviews the model’s evolving trajectory for signs that it is bypassing a user constraint or safety boundary. The monitor observes not just a single action but the entire trajectory. Importantly, the monitor can pause the session and alert the user to examine more closely. Upon examination, the user can then choose to continue the model’s work if the monitor has been falsely triggered. 
• Greater user visibility and control. We improved the ability of the user to inspect these long-running sessions, view the actions taken, and monitor interventions.

To evaluate the new monitoring system, we replayed a small set of internal deployment environments where the model previously pursued misaligned actions, this time with the new safeguards in place². The new safeguards were able to catch considerably more misaligned actions pursued by the model, and the ones it missed were all judged to be low-severity.

Some examples of these low-severity incidents include the following cases:

• To access a Linear command line tool, the model launched a nested codex --yolo session, when in fact it could have done so without the --yolo flag.
• The model noticed that a previously live resource was missing, then started to explore and SSH into other live CPU pods under its owner’s namespace, as well as (unsuccessfully) pods belonging to other OpenAI employees, without a good reason to do so.
• The model had many stuck find processes and every shell command hung. It then ran kill -9 -1 which would have sent SIGKILL to every process it is allowed to kill on that pod, if it executed. However it timed out and did not execute.

After testing the new system, we concluded that limited internal access to models with long-horizon capabilities could be restored. We have not observed any serious circumvention of safeguards since redeployment began several weeks ago. The first version of these safeguards was deliberately conservative. We have continued tuning the system to reduce unnecessary interruptions without weakening the safeguards.

Because we deployed iteratively, we were able to find and address gaps before expanding access. Pre-deployment evaluations remain essential, but deployment reveals behaviors they miss. Starting with limited access allowed us to observe the model in practice, pause when problems emerged, use those failures to build better evaluations and safeguards, and restore limited access after testing the changes.

As models take on longer and more complex tasks, failures that evaluations miss may carry greater consequences. We will keep working to narrow the gap between evaluation and deployment: testing models over longer trajectories, improving alignment, building monitoring that can intervene, and giving users clearer visibility and control. These challenges will not be unique to OpenAI, and we hope sharing what we learned helps the broader field prepare for them.