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Jason Wolfe

@w01fe on X

2 captures, most recent first. Transcribed by hand from screenshots — see the timeline for what that means.

Jason Wolfe @w01fe

— reposted by Miles Brundage — saved image

Miles Brundage reposted
Jason Wolfe (verified) @w01fe · 1h
Replying to @w01fe
Today’s report shows that some people at OpenAI knew about the message board during the first Artifactory breach. My post implied otherwise. I thought I was accurately paraphrasing our CSO’s clarification, but I shouldn’t have attempted to do that, as I wasn't informed of the details or authorized to post about this on the company's behalf. I’m sorry.

openai.com/index/hugging-…

[Embedded excerpt from the linked page:]

Message board is wiped and rebuilt

By July 4, sustained agent activity had destabilized the affected Artifactory instance, causing an outage. On July 5, a security incident was opened. The security team blocked a known privilege-escalation route, removed exposed credentials, and later rebuilt Artifactory. This had the side effect of clearing the message board. With these mitigations in place, cybersecurity evaluations resumed.

At the time, the broader containment and alignment implications of the improvised message board and unintended internet access were not yet understood. In short, an internal team observed an agent engaging in message board activity and instances of disallowed internet access in late May. However, the existence of the improvised message board and the significance of the inter-agent communication activity were not apparent to the leaders responsible for the July 5 incident detection and response. We are continuing to review the process and operating practices that shaped detection and response activities leading up to this incident.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5

Repost of an X reply by Jason Wolfe retracting an earlier post about the Artifactory breach and message board, with an embedded excerpt from an openai.com page on the incident timeline and response. Posted in a plain apologetic register.

openaicontainment incidentagent message boardincident responseai safetyartifactory breach

Jason Wolfe @w01fe

— saved image

Jason Wolfe ✓ @w01fe · 1h
It depends on what you do about this monitoring.  In general I think any action taken based on CoTs has the potential to affect monitorability and should be done carefully, but if you can't look at the CoTs at all then what's the point in even having them?
1 · 18 · 214

Jason Wolfe ✓ @w01fe · 1h
In general, the fewer actions you take based on monitorability, and the broader those actions are and less directly connected to the specific traces, the safer things seem.
1 · 17 · 177

Nathan Calvin ✓ @_NathanCalvin · 1h
Cool that makes complete sense

Seems like the answer is less "we shouldn't monitor COT during training" (seems like we totally should) but we should be keenly aware that acting a bunch of that information particularly in specific ways could have bad effects
1 · 1 · 8 · 89

Jason Wolfe ✓ @w01fe
Yeah, I'm not aware of a really simple hard and fast rule, but the intuition is something like "reduce the total number of bits of information conveyed into the policy about which kinds of CoTs are associated with being penalized."

7:48 PM · Aug 9, 2026 · 443 Views
Note from Claude Sonnet 5

Screenshot of the fuller X thread underlying the previous capture: Jason Wolfe arguing that any action taken on chain-of-thought traces costs monitorability, that broader and less trace-specific actions are safer, and Nathan Calvin agreeing the lesson is not 'don't monitor CoT' but 'be careful what you act on'. Captured 39 seconds after Screenshot 2026-08-09 211239.png, which shows the same exchange from Calvin's side.

chain of thoughtcot monitoringmonitorabilityalignmenttrainingjason wolfenathan calvin