Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they actually wanted to test the model without internet access they'd have run it air gapped, not relied on a buggy software sandbox. This is pretty clearly a marketing stunt by OpenAI, otherwise the story just doesn't add up
> not relied on a buggy software sandbox. Third, while we had tested and validated this sandbox, the agents were able to chain together previously unknown vulnerabilities (“0-days”) in the package management service exposed within the sandbox to bypass restrictions How were they supposed to know about "previously unknown vulnerabilities"? > This is pretty clearly a marketing stunt by OpenAI, otherwise the story just…
By disabling the models' own internal restrictions (or training without them) OpenAI was, effectively, running an AI malware lab. The standard IT practice for a malware lab is to airgap and wipe EVERYTHING, and to assume any software sandboxing is made of cardboard and niceties. You don't have to know about specific vulnerabilities to infer that they might exist, and there's defense strategies for unknown vulnerabilities.
If a model found a way to jump an airgap by, say, using their CPU's clock generator like a Wi-Fi antenna, then yeah, that would be a "previously unknown vulnerability" and one that couldn't be reasonably foreseen. But it's reasonably foreseeable that a model with unknown cyber capabilities might figure out how to break out of a sandbox, given that sandboxes get broken out of all the time in security research.
What I would have expected from a competent AI malware lab would have been, say, an inference box with a bunch of serial cables to individual blade servers with no network access and a preloaded drive full of Linux ISOs the model can stand up. When a model's context is wiped so is their attendant box, preferably by someone yanking the drive out and imaging it from a dedicated imaging machine. I can foresee other attacks (e.g. firmware persistence) that could have more exotic countermeasures designed for them, but this would at least be the bare minimum for taking AI safety seriously. (Y'know, the whole reason why OpenAI stopped being Open?)