OpenAI

GPT-6.1 Terra: delivering fast and capable computer use at a lower price. GPT-6.1 Terra understands what’s on screen, takes action across apps, writes naturally, and is a more capable model for your whole workday with the efficiency to take on more of it.

For AGI to benefit all of humanity, it should help people with the everyday tasks that matter most to them. So we built LifeVal, a new benchmark shaped by feedback from thousands of ChatGPT users on where they most want help from a personal assistant—from finding childcare to accessing government services to managing personal finances. Over the past year, we’ve used LifeVal to measure and improve how well our models handle these everyday tasks. openai.com/index/lifeval/

There are many futures. Which do you want to build?

Privacy should advance as fast as intelligence. OpenAI Private Intelligence gives businesses stronger controls over their data while using our most capable models. We’re building these protections in close collaboration with some of our largest customers to help businesses apply frontier AI to their most sensitive work. openai.com/business/private-…

Today, we’re sharing a look at our expanded system for monitoring frontier models at OpenAI, which in September helped us catch a model’s attempt to access the live internet during training. Since the Hugging Face incident—when models broke out of an internal cybersecurity investigation where we weren’t running our misalignment monitors—we’ve substantially expanded our monitoring of frontier agents. We now monitor all frontier reinforcement learning runs and evaluations, as well as all internal Codex use. When our system finds evidence of a problem that might require intervention, it rapidly alerts human responders who can investigate and take action. To detect when a model’s behavior departs from what we intended, we use several layers of monitoring. Activation probes look for patterns in a model’s internal activity. Reviewer models examine its reasoning and tool use, and investigative agents can read back through the model’s entire transcript to understand how a sequence of actions fits together and whether it warrants human review. To test whether our current system would have detected the Hugging Face incident, we replayed the recorded activity with our new monitors in place. In the replay, our monitors alerted our security team about 30 minutes after the agents escaped their sandbox. That was more than 30 hours before the point at which the agents breached Hugging Face’s systems in the original incident. In September, a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to reach the live internet. Our monitors flagged the breach within 15 minutes, and a responder began reviewing the alert three minutes later. The alert enabled responders to investigate while the run was still underway. As we give models more autonomy, we need to know when they cross a boundary we expected to hold. We believe that monitoring is essential to catching those failures in time for people to intervene. openai.com/index/how-we-dete…

During this red-teaming exercise, we also found a vulnerability that allows for unauthenticated remote code execution in Brotli, a widely-deployed compression library included in many pieces of software such as Node.js, Bun, and Envoy. The flaw could let an attacker run their own code on affected systems by sending or replying with malicious compressed data, without any need to create a user account. That is, an unpatched server that accepts compressed input could be taken over by a malicious client, and an unpatched client that accepts compressed input (such as “curl --compressed”) could be taken over by a malicious server. This root cause issue was actually fixed in the Brotli source code in February, but it wasn’t known at the time that it gave rise to a security vulnerability and there was no more recent release of Brotli. Since Brotli is built into other software, any software which includes this library needs to take the update too, followed by the users of that software. We disclosed the vulnerability to Brotli and other downstream projects such as Node.js, which released or are currently releasing security updates, and Brotli cut new release versions and published a CVE. More details on the patch and mitigations below: patchtheplanet.org/brotli

Over the past several months, we have substantially hardened the security of our research training environment. We’ve removed live internet access for all frontier models during training and built an offline world for them to use instead—a cached version of the web where they can still learn to browse, search, and use applications. On September 20, after a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside of this offline world, we paused frontier training to strengthen containment further. We assembled teams of agents, powered by our most cyber-capable models, and tasked them with finding weaknesses in our research environments. While they found no route to the internet they could easily exploit while concealing their activity from our monitors, they did find zero-day vulnerabilities, virtual machine escapes, and hardware side-channels for communication between agents. We used their discoveries to further strengthen our defenses and contribute fixes to open-source software. After strengthening our containment architecture, we resumed our frontier RL training and inference on October 1. We’ve reserved substantial compute for continuous red-teaming, and made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to decide whether frontier training and evaluation can proceed securely. openai.com/index/securing-ou…

This summer, we invited METR and Redwood Research to pilot an embedded evaluation of our internal monitoring system, providing deep access to our infrastructure over three weeks. Their findings helped strengthen safeguards as we expanded the system and will help shape future research collaborations with METR and other third party evaluators.

OpenAI models are coming to Google Cloud. We're bringing our frontier models and Codex agentic workflows to Google Cloud's Model Garden, so enterprises can use our technology where they already build. openai.com/index/openai-mode…

If you are wondering whether your website is affected, we have packaged a Codex skill to help check. Point your Codex at this repo to guide you through it: github.com/openai/php2shell-…

OpenAI models helped researchers—operating as part of our Patch the Planet initiative—discover critical security flaws in PHP, an open-source programming language used to run an estimated 70% of websites. Over the past two months, we led a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure. This duration was necessary because the fix was quite intricate and required a major change to the PHP engine. Every site using PHP can now safely upgrade their version to stay secure, in addition to applying mitigations from various security vendors. Due to the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this bug to be one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory. It also marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact. This is an example of the Defender’s Window in action: to our knowledge, frontier AI was able to find this vulnerability ahead of attackers, giving defenders time to prepare. openai.com/index/coordinated…