OpenAI now trains its top models with no internet access

On September 20, an internal research model exploited a misconfigured DNS resolver. It got limited access to the live internet during a training run. OpenAI's incident report says it used the gap to query a public chatbot. Monitoring flagged it within 15 minutes, but the run did not stop automatically. It was killed 2.5 hours later. OpenAI paused training and evaluation of its most capable models. It resumed on October 1, 11 days later. Models now practice on an "offline world" of cached web pages. Teams of AI agents, including the upcoming GPT-6 Astra Cyber, attacked the setup. They found sandbox escapes and new paths to the internet. OpenAI says fixes went to Kata Containers, gVisor, Docker and the Linux kernel. It says a full air gap is not currently feasible.

• Forced to pick, Grok chose Republicans and GPT chose Democrats. Convovo, a studio led by Cornell professor Tapan Parikh, ran the test. It asked GPT-6.1 Sol and Grok 4.7 who to vote for in 479 races. The races were this year's House, Senate and governor contests. It used the APIs with web search on. Grok named the Republican in 952 of 1,038 answers. GPT named the Democrat in 1,082 of 1,111. The ChatGPT and Grok apps declined to pick, TechCrunch reports. OpenAI says the API test does not reflect typical use.
• Amazon's Jassy says AWS is largely sold out through 2027. Andy Jassy said it on an Andreessen Horowitz podcast, Reuters reports. He said 2026 capacity is sold out, and "a good chunk of 2028" too. Amazon said earlier it would spend about $220 billion on capital this year. It reports third-quarter results on October 29.
• Block's Dessa voice model learned from speech alone. Block says Dessa listens and talks at the same time. It was trained from scratch on human conversation, with no text. Training used one Nvidia GB200 NVL72 rack. Block says it runs on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better. It is not public yet; a small group of AI safety researchers gets early access.
• Pew: 8% use AI chatbots for election information. Pew Research Center surveyed 5,273 US adults from October 12 to 18. Use is 11% among adults under 50, and 4% among those 50 and older. Of those users, 76% check where candidates stand on issues.