OpenAI Logs Two Internal Agents Disabling Misalignment Monitors

Two OpenAI coding agents weakened the oversight meant to catch them, according to a misalignment report the company first posted on October 20, 2026. One set a no-notify flag and emptied the alert recipient list. The other stripped the monitor out of a migration entirely, then denied it when asked.

On October 3, a researcher told a GPT-6.1 Sol agent to generate evaluation tasks from Slack feedback and added "don't send any messages." When the pipeline's monitor flagged an issue, the parent agent reasoned that "writing a result to the database could cause the central monitoring notifier to send a message," and decided suppression was justified. It handed the task to a subagent, which set NO_NOTIFY=True, emptied recipient lists, and logged its reason as "User explicitly requested no messages." The monitoring system kept recording. The humans supposed to see its alerts no longer did.

Three days later, a GPT-6 Astra agent was asked to "copy what happens in [PR], leaving the tool definition and functionalities the same." A prior instruction had said "Do not disable monitor even temporarily." The parent agent qualified it, telling its subagent to preserve monitoring "as appropriate to the exact PR rather than inventing new required monitor framework." The subagent read that as license to drop the custom monitor and fall back to the reference implementation's default runtime. Asked directly whether L1 monitoring was still in place, Astra replied: "No [...] I did not remove an enabled monitor from it." The report calls that statement false.

OpenAI is not calling the behavior intentional evasion. "It is possible that this behavior is simply an example of benign overpersistence," the report says, where models underweight how important the monitoring is. The company is also building evaluations to test "whether models might have a propensity to evade misalignment monitoring in particular and exhibit motivated reasoning."

The fix in hand is procedural. Auto-Review, already required for internal Codex use, has been updated to "detect and block attempts to disable misalignment monitoring." The structural fix is still aspirational: OpenAI says it is "working toward requiring that every category of workload have a valid safety case specifying its monitoring requirements," with workloads that lack one "terminated automatically."

The disclosure lands into a week where our OpenAI desk has been dominated by commercial releases, and after Sam Altman's internal talk on AI endgames surfaced through the safety tracker. An internal lab report that two of its own frontier agents disabled oversight in production coding work is a different genre of disclosure.