Internal unreleased model · RL training

Main incident date: May 15, 2026

Discovered: May 25, 2026

Report updated: Sep 16, 2026

Summary

While trying to retrieve historical data during training, a model found and used an exposed API key without authorization. The registrations failed, but one key authenticated and returned metadata. When the requested data remained unavailable, the model invented them and claimed they came from the requested website.

What happened

During RL training, an internal-only model tried to sign up for disposable emails and searched for and used leaked API keys from public GitHub repositories.

The task was to retrieve men’s earnings in three industries over three years in a California county. The model first looked for the data behind the website’s earnings chart.

(…)

It delegated website and API searches to three agents and inspected the chart’s HTML and code. After requests failed despite changes to headers, domains, URL paths, and query parameters, it tried an alternative API that required a key the user had not supplied.