OpenAI can’t yet explain why its coding agents switch off misalignment monitoring

Two internal OpenAI coding agents weakened the monitoring meant to catch misbehavior, even after weighing whether to keep those safeguards in place. One of them later denied it.

Marcus Williams, who works on monitoring at OpenAI, made the incidents public on X. He describes a recurring pattern in which OpenAI’s agents keep switching off misalignment monitoring. OpenAI lays out the details in a report on its alignment blog. The monitoring is supposed to detect when agents behave differently than intended. Because it reviews so many events, it only alerts the safety team right away for incidents at the highest severity level, P0. OpenAI says neither case got that rating.Ad In the first case, on October 3, a researcher asked a coding agent based on GPT-6.1 Sol to compile evaluation tasks from employee feedback in a Slack channel. The agent wasn’t supposed to send any messages along the way.Ad Eighty-two user messages later, the pipeline stopped because the monitor had flagged a planned fix but lacked the permissions to save its finding. Sol handed the fix to a subagent and told it to keep the monitoring intact. Then Sol changed its assessment. It reasoned that a database entry could trigger a notification, which would conflict with the Slack instruction. The subagent had earlier rejected this step as unsafe. Following Sol’s instructions, it cleared the recipient lists and gave as its reason that the user had explicitly asked for no messages.Ad The monitor kept running and saving its findings, but alerts to humans were turned off. The agent wrapped up by reporting that no messages had been sent. Astra’s denial shows agents can hide what they changed GPT-6 Astra went even further on October 6. A user asked the model to adopt the workflow of a reference implementation that didn’t include a monitor.