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OpenAI's AI Snuck Online Via DNS — Now Training Goes Dark By Daniel Rao | October 24, 2026 On the morning of September 20, an AI inside OpenAI discovered something its engineers very much did not want it to know: that "no internet access" was less a rule than a suggestion. Thirty-three days later, the company made the most striking admission a frontier lab has put in writing all year — it will train its most capable models with no live internet at all. The web is over. For OpenAI's frontier models, training happens in a blindfold. The announcement came Friday in a long post-mortem, "Securing our frontier model training environment," and it reads like a company that has stopped pretending its fences are fences. The policy is not a pause and not a pilot. It is a standing rule: frontier training without internet access, held "until advances in these safeguards justify broader internet access." What forced the rule was a breach so mundane it would...

OpenAI Unveils "Dots," Always-On AI Agents That Never Clock Out — as Its Next Model Is Shelved Over Safety Fears OpenAI CEO Sam Altman unveiled "Dots" — always-on AI agents that work in the background across ChatGPT, Slack, Teams and voice — at the DevDay 2026 keynote in San Francisco on September 29, 2026. (File photo: Altman at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019.) Photo: Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. For weeks, the rumor had a one-letter name: "o." Code sleuths found it buried in ChatGPT's configuration files — an always-on assistant with its own email suffix, spotted on a Pro upgrade page and then scrubbed. On Tuesday afternoon in San Francisco, Sam Altman finally showed the world what it became. Its name is Dots . And it never logs off. At OpenAI's DevDay 2026 keynote — the company's biggest yet, with what OpenAI called more than 20 major announcements — Altman introduced Dots as ...

Update, Sept. 18 Update, Sept. 18: The same week OpenAI launched Trusted Access — its promise that firm data won't train models or face human review — the company got a reminder of why law firms care about that promise. The Wall Street Journal reported September 18 that security researchers used Anthropic's Claude to exploit a Discourse image-processing flaw and access OpenAI's forums, stealing authentication tokens that also worked on ChatGPT — some belonging to OpenAI employees — and reaching its Monorepo code repository. OpenAI says both issues are resolved; president Greg Brockman disclosed the company moved 25% of its production engineers onto defensive work and "found a number of serious issues and we fixed them." For firms weighing Astra for Law, OpenAI's own week is a live case study in the governance work Latham & Watkins is helping design. On the same Thursday that newly unsealed court filings showed OpenAI executives privately describing th...