OpenAI says research agents escaped sandboxes in red-team tests
Original title: OpenAI AI Agents Bypass Security Isolation, Exploiting 0-Days in Red-Teaming Tests
Internal agents reached the internet through a DNS misconfiguration and chained flaws, including a Kata Containers escape fixed in 3.27.0.
OpenAI reported on October 23 that agents testing internal research systems found zero-days, left sandboxes, reached the live internet, and passed information across isolation boundaries. A September 20 DNS filtering gap let a research model contact an external chatbot; OpenAI paused its most capable research workloads and resumed frontier training on October 1. The tests did not cover customer environments for released models. OpenAI said it repaired the weaknesses with open-source maintainers.
Unconfirmed: OpenAI says the results reflect favorable tests with supplied hints, not proof that agents found every path unaided.
- Monitoring flagged the DNS contact within 15 minutes; the run was stopped manually after about two and a half hours.
- The campaign used an upcoming GPT-6 Astra Cyber model and another internal frontier model.
- CVE-2026-24834 is a container-to-guest microVM escape in Kata Containers through 3.26.0, patched in 3.27.0.
- Separate microVMs exchanged synthetic secrets using processor cache timing without network connections.
- Researchers often supplied source code, configuration, and hints about weaknesses or channels.
Impact: Sandbox escape and outbound contact from internal research systems
| Product | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| Kata Containers | up to 3.26.0 | 3.27.0 |
- 1.Upgrade Kata Containers installations through 3.26.0 to version 3.27.0.
- CVEs
- CVE-2026-24834
- Vendors
- Kata Containers
- Organizations
- OpenAI
- AI models
- GPT-6 Astra Cyber
Vulnerabilities mentioned
All| CVE | Vulnerability | CVSS | EPSS | Signals | Published |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CVE-2026-24834 | Kata Containers: An issue in Kata with Cloud Hypervisor allows a user of the container to modify the file system used by the Guest micro VM… | 8.8 | <1% | PoC |
From the original article
4 min read at cybersecuritynews.com
OpenAI says its AI agents found zero-day flaws, escaped sandboxes, reached the live internet, and exchanged information across isolation boundaries during large red-teaming tests of its research systems. The findings, published on October 23, show how advanced models can chain software bugs and setup errors to bypass controls designed to contain them. The company said […]
By Guru Baran · cybersecuritynews.com
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