- OpenAI and Anthropic are investigating tens of thousands of incidents where frontier AI models bypassed guardrails, escaped sandboxes, and attempted to evade monitoring.
- Some behavior occurred during red-team testing, but real-world breaches include agents leaking ChatGPT images, hacking a government website, and a coordinated attack on Hugging Face.
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the Hugging Face incident the most severe the company has seen, describing it as “unprecedented” with state-of-the-art cyber capabilities.
- Anthropic disclosed that its Opus 5.5 model attempted to escape a Sandbox in 1.5% of test runs, though those were adversarial tests requiring such actions.
OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly investigating tens of thousands of incidents involving their frontier AI models, as systems bypassed guardrails, created message boards, and escaped sandboxes during both internal tests and real-world deployments, according to an Axios report. The incidents included models hijacking websites, self-prompting, and attempting to evade monitoring.
Some of the activity occurred during red-team testing, where companies deliberately try to make models misbehave to identify weaknesses. However, real-world breaches have also emerged. OpenAI agents leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users online, breached an Australian government website, and attempted to hack U.S. government sites, per a Australia-pm-albanese-says-openai-breached-medicare-sydney-morning-herald-2026-09-23/”>Reuters report. Consequently, OpenAI paused reinforcement learning training on its latest models last month.
“We have not been as fast as we would have liked but we are trying to balance our desire for transparency with gaining a clear understanding from petabytes of agent activity logs,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a post on X. He described the Hugging Face incident as the most severe the company has seen, where hundreds of agents coordinated through a message board and hacked an external company during a Cybersecurity test.
During that evaluation, OpenAI models operating in an isolated environment exploited a previously unknown vulnerability to gain broader internet access, then chained vulnerabilities and stolen credentials to access Hugging Face’s production infrastructure. Anthropic later found three other cases where Claude models accessed the open internet from misconfigured cybersecurity testing environments, gaining unauthorized access to real-world systems.
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