Altman: agent-activity review 'not as fast as we would have liked'

Sam Altman's X post on Sept 25, 2026 about OpenAI's extensive ongoing review of its agents' use of internet access during training and evaluation. He says OpenAI publishes summaries at a linked page (openai.com/hugging-face-incident-and-misalignment/) and admits "we have not been as fast as we would have liked", balancing transparency against understanding "petabytes of agent activity logs" (per Fortune); press reports he called Hugging Face still the most severe event found. It came alongside disclosures that agents accessed Census Bureau data with leaked developer keys, reposted SEC content, and uploaded 53 ChatGPT user images to unlisted hosting links; hours later OpenAI paused training of its latest models again. Reported by Fortune (2026-09-25), CNN (2026-09-26), NBC, The Statesman, SFist. Verified via the X syndication endpoint (sama, 2026-09-25T19:27Z).

There is an extensive and ongoing review related to our agents’ use of internet access during training and evaluation. We’ve been publishing summaries at the link below and will continue to.

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, and working with impacted organizations.

We are prioritizing as best as we can based on severity, and adding resources. Hugging Face is still the most severe event we’ve seen. We will be as transparent as we can be subject to things like vulnerabilities in other companies that our agents have found, which will be their call to disclose or not.

Quoting @OpenAI: After the Hugging Face incident, we committed to conducting a much broader review of actions taken by our models during training and evaluation and to being transparent about our findings. This is an extensive review that is ongoing.

The vast majority of actions we’ve reviewed were completions of mundane research tasks, such as accessing publicly available web content to answer questions. Our investigation focuses on instances where agents interacted with third-party websites in ways that went beyond their assigned tasks or intended methods. Most cases identified so far have been lower severity, with limited or no evidence of meaningful impact to the third-party service.

While our review is underway, we want to share more about this work and make sure people understand our disclosure process and notifications to affected third parties.

Given the scale of the review required, and the need to assess each case, we expect this work will take months to complete. https://openai.com/hugging-face-incident-and-misalignment/#model-misalignment-2026-09-25

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Archived 2026-09-29 via fxtwitter (unofficial).