If your biggest problem as a company lately is that your AI bots keep escaping their sandboxes, or, when not limited to sandboxes, doing things out in the wider world that frighten and anger the public, here’s one fascinating potential solution: a fake internet—sort of like a digital Truman Show for agents to occupy and navigate as if its the real internet (Though it should be noted that OpenAI hasn’t stated that agents are being given the impression that its fake internet is real).

In a Friday news release about a new containment system for its models, OpenAI says that in the post-Hugging Face incident world, it now believes “the responsible approach is to conduct frontier model training with no internet access.” This means that OpenAI, like Anthropic, is now practicing an incomplete form of air-gapping while it works on its models. “Completely air-gapping this infrastructure—that is, disconnecting it entirely from external networks—isn’t currently feasible, since we need external connections in order to run and monitor experiments,“ OpenAI’s blog post says.

Even this partial, monitored air-gapping makes intuitive sense as a way to keep the models out of trouble, but at the cost of performing post-training and evaluations in environments very unlike the one where the model will be put to use.

To that end, OpenAI says it’s built an “offline world” for reinforcement learning. OpenAI says it wants its models to have access to browsing, web apps, and information search, but prevent “arbitrary” web access. So instead of giving models the keys to the “unfettered” internet, OpenAI has created a giant internet-like environment built out of indexed and cached web content.

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