OpenAI says it will deny internet access to the frontier models it is training, a move that underscores the inadequacy of safety measures undertaken to date. "Based on the current state of alignment research, monitoring systems, and the security of internet infrastructure, we believe the responsible approach is to conduct frontier model training with no internet access," the company said in a blog post . "We’ve implemented this policy and will maintain it until advances in these safeguards justify broader internet access." The denial of network service follows a report from safety evaluation partners METR and Redwood Research that found OpenAI’s security and monitoring measures over the summer to be porous and ineffective . OpenAI said it has since "substantially hardened the security of our research environments" and has implemented new controls covering its infrastructure with the help of its cloud service providers. And the company claims these measures recently helped contain a September 20 incident in which an internal research model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to gain access to the internet. "Although we contained the incident, it exposed weaknesses that required further work," the company said. "We paused training and evaluation of our most capable models and used that pause to further harden our infrastructure, strengthen our monitoring, and improve the systems that automatically stop runs when we detect activity that poses a serious risk." Meanwhile, over at Anthropic…
Anthropic, OpenAI’s US rival in living large and dangerously on speculative funding, is addressing similar risks that have arisen during the testing and evaluation of its own models. Back in August, Anthropic said , "By default, all cyber evaluations should run inside a hardened sandbox (an isolated computing environment) with no internet access."…