OpenAI
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UserProxyBench: Evaluating LLM User Simulators for Agent Benchmarks and Training
Interactive agent benchmarks and multi-turn reinforcement learning increasingly place a second language model in the role of the user. This simulated user controls what information the agent receives and when, yet current benchmarks score only the agent and do not directly measure whether the user correctly executed its assigned role. We introduce UserProxyBench, an evaluation layer over the tau-bench family, and the User Fidelity Score (UFS), which measures adherence to the benchmark's private user instructions using task-grounded rubric criteria scored independently of agent success. Holding the agent fixed at GPT-5.5 and varying only the user proxy across 375 enterprise tasks changes mean task reward by 15.2 points, while 24.4% of successful episodes contain a user-specification violation. The dominant failure is premature disclosure: users provide information before it is requested. This behavior has little effect on task reward, yet among successful episodes it causes the agent to make 1.06 fewer tool calls on average, changing the interaction being evaluated while preserving the reward. Finally, across seven proxies we identify an empirical cost-fidelity frontier, enabling practitioners to select the least expensive simulator that satisfies a required fidelity level.
OpenAI launches Dots, its bubbly agentic avatar
Dots are meant to operate independent of any specific hardware or interface, pursuing user-defined goals continuously in the background with minimal oversight.
OpenAI gives Codex reusable cloud environments that work across devices
OpenAI is expanding Codex with reusable cloud development environments, a revamped CLI with voice controls, new code review tools and a security-focused product for scanning…
OpenAI launches GPT-6.1 Sol, says it nearly matches GPT-6 Astra and costs less
OpenAI says GPT-6.1 Sol delivers significant improvements over GPT-6 Sol across complex professional tasks, including code writing and debugging, document understanding, and executing multi-step business…
OpenAI expands ChatGPT’s plugins with app-like interfaces and automations
OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT plugins with dedicated sidebar homes, interactive panels, file viewers, improved discovery, and support for automations.
OpenAI launches Dots, its Muse competitor
OpenAI is responding to Meta's buzzy Muse AI with agentic helpers of its own: Dots. During its DevDay keynote on Tuesday, OpenAI announced that Dots…
Protesters gather at OpenAI’s DevDay
On Tuesday, OpenAI's annual DevDay event began with protests, flyers and chants. "Sam Altman, get off it, put people over profit," said a group of…
GPT 6.1 Sol
Auditable Long-Term Memory: A Deterministic Retrieval Chain Measured at 479/475 of 500 on LongMemEval-S
We evaluate an auditable long-term memory system on LongMemEval-S. Its retrieval chain uses hybrid candidate retrieval, cross-encoder reranking, coverage-first packet compilation, and deterministic reasoning scaffolds; an LLM is used only as a replaceable final reader. The chain places all gold sessions in the candidate pool for 468/470 answerable questions and produces gold-complete packets for 462/470. With a Claude Opus reader called through an unpinned CLI alias, two 500-question passes score 479/500 and 475/500 under GPT-4o. The 72 answerable knowledge-update rows used a substantively modified scoring prompt whose effect under the official text has not been measured. The pair straddles Chronos High's published 478/500; differences in reader generation, scoring prompt, and possibly data version, plus within-system variance, establish neither superiority nor equivalence. A grok-4.6-high reader on the same packets scores 476/474, while a maximum-reasoning-effort agentic variant regresses to 461/465. The headline passes differ on eight verdict-flip rows. A second judge agrees with the headline judge on 493/500 rows (98.6%) in each pass and scores both passes 472/500; the official judge also flips three verdicts when re-scoring byte-identical pass-1 answers. Negative controls rejected a verifier that repaired three wrong drafts but broke eleven correct drafts. All components were developed on the same 500 questions, with no held-out evaluation or independent human adjudication; retrieval and scaffold method sources and transcript-derived audits are held; and the headline reader received extra operator context, its complete requests were not retained, and MCP tool availability is unresolved. We release materialized packets, scaffolds, reader outputs, judge verdicts, and controls for inspection and re-scoring.
OpenAI DevDay 2026: The biggest news and announcements
It’s OpenAI’s turn in the fall tech events calendar. The company is hosting its annual DevDay on September 29th in San Francisco, starting with a…
Meta’s Muse AI sent a YouTuber’s address to a stranger
Tech YouTuber Matt Robb says that Muse gave out his home address to a total stranger this weekend, after authorizing the bot to handle his…
OpenAI apologizes to Australia after its AI agents breached government sites
The company also detailed how some of those breaches had happened, and outlined additional measures it is taking to assess the impact of the events.
Will Chinese AI companies slow down? A top House Democrat wants answers
As President Donald Trump prepares to meet tech and AI CEOs in Washington, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) is calling for a treaty between the US…
DevDay 2026 Recap
Explore more than 20 announcements from OpenAI DevDay 2026, including GPT-6 Astra, ChatGPT, Codex, APIs, security, and new tools for builders.
Introducing GPT-6.1 Sol
Meet GPT-6.1 Sol: near-Astra intelligence for coding, computer use, and professional work at one-fifth of Astra’s standard API input and output token prices.
Safer Content or Firmer Refusals? A Hybrid Perturbation Defense for Alignment under Harmful Fine-tuning
Fine-tuning-as-a-service lets users adapt a safety-aligned language model to their own data, but it also creates a harmful fine-tuning attack surface: a small amount of harmful data mixed into an otherwise benign fine-tuning set can degrade the model's alignment. Two recent alignment-stage defenses address this problem at different levels of the model. Vaccine improves the robustness of hidden embeddings to the representation shifts induced by harmful fine-tuning, whereas Booster simulates harmful weight updates and attenuates their effect during alignment. We investigate whether these mechanisms are complementary and propose VaccineBooster, a single alignment procedure that combines embedding perturbation and weight-level gradient attenuation within each training step. On Llama-2-7B aligned with BeaverTails and then attacked through poisoned fine-tuning, VaccineBooster achieves the lowest OpenAI moderation score among the compared defenses, 0.315, while a Booster-Only variant retains the highest post-attack refusal rate, 50%. Together with ablations over the embedding-perturbation and gradient-attenuation strengths, these results indicate a trade-off: embedding perturbation primarily reduces flagged harmful content, whereas gradient attenuation primarily preserves explicit refusal behavior. Because our evaluation uses ten prompts and a single unseeded run per configuration, we report this trade-off as an observed pattern rather than a statistically resolved effect. These results provide practical guidance for prioritizing content safety or refusal retention when aligned models are exposed to untrusted fine-tuning.