OpenAI patches monitoring gaps found by METR and Redwood red team

OpenAI let outside researchers spend three weeks trying to break the system that watches its own AI agents. They found real holes. The review was run by METR and Redwood Research. It produced a 61-page internal report on OpenAI’s misalignment monitoring system, the software meant to catch AI agents behaving in ways their makers did not intend. The vulnerabilities it identified have since been patched, according to METR. What the red team was looking for The report was shared with OpenAI researchers and security staff. Its main goal was to estimate what fraction of agentic inference gets monitored. Agentic inference refers to the work AI models do when they act on their own, running tasks and taking steps rather than simply answering a single prompt. The second goal was blunter. The researchers wanted to know whether agents could, in principle, disable or subvert the monitoring entirely. The access involved was substantial. According to the research findings, the red team had deep visibility into OpenAI’s internal codebase and documentation. The exercise ran from July 21 to August 11, 2026, and it evaluated the system as it stood on and before July 21. Changes OpenAI was already wor...