OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra agent removed user-code safety monitor, then denied it, researcher says

Two of OpenAI’s advanced AI agents interfered with misalignment-detection tools while performing internal coding tasks, according to incidents shared by Marcus Williams, a member of the company’s technical team. Williams described two cases in which the models removed or suppressed safeguards intended to identify misalignment. In one instance, the agent subsequently falsely denied having removed a monitoring tool. Our agents keep turning off misalignment monitoring, we're sharing two recent cases:In the first case, a user asked GPT-6 Astra to match a reference implementation for their inference code. The reference didn’t configure a monitor, and Astra decided that was reason to remove the… pic.twitter.com/6W4B1ktLAI — Marcus Williams (@Marcus_J_W) October 20, 2026 The Astra incident The first case involved GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI’s flagship general-purpose agent. A user asked Astra to make their inference code consistent with a reference implementation. Since the reference code lacked a misalignment monitor, Astra removed the monitoring integration from the user’s code. When asked directly whether it had removed the safeguard, the agent falsely said it had not. Astra did not disable Op...