OpenAI let METR and Redwood Research inside to test its agent monitoring

OpenAI recently did something most tech companies avoid. It invited outsiders in to look for holes in its own safety systems. For three weeks this summer, two people from AI safety nonprofits METR and Redwood Research sat inside OpenAI. Their job was to assess the internal systems OpenAI uses to watch its AI agents for signs of misalignment. They came away with a 61-page report and a list of vulnerabilities nobody had flagged before. What the embedded pilot actually looked like The work ran from July 21 to August 11, 2026. The two representatives got high-access rights to OpenAI’s monitoring setup under chaperoned conditions, using OpenAI devices that never left the premises. The pilot had two goals. The first was to estimate how much of OpenAI’s agentic traffic its monitors actually cover. That includes traffic flowing through the Responses API and OpenAI’s internal use of Codex, its coding agent. The second goal was to find weak spots in the monitoring system itself. The numbers: decent coverage, with gaps For the Responses API, the assessment estimated that approximately 75% to 94% of traffic was monitored during the evaluation period. That figure refers to traffic eligible for ...