— Within the next few years, we believe that if there are vulnerabilities in a given software project, frontier models will likely be able to discover them and even less capable models may be able to develop exploits once disclosed, OpenAI says.
They also say that after this exploit batch, now «having access to a low-privileged account on an operating system that isn’t updated should be considered functionally equivalent to root access for a well-resourced threat actor,» underscoring the significance of these findings.
The «campaign» cost about $1,200,000 in API credits, or $1,279 per exploit, and OpenAI explains that they optimized for execution, not cost. Engineers might well build optimized agent harnesses to bring the cost substantially down, they say.
Going by the rates paid for exploits of this severity on Pwn2Own and TyphoonPWN, OpenAI reckons their findings could be valued between $19 million and $66 million, with «historical bounty amounts.»
GPT-5.5 Cyber had previously found 24 privilege escalations in June, making these discoveries about 40 times as many, even though systems had three months of hardening in between the runs.
Read more: OpenAI’s detailed presentation, X post. Discussion on Hacker News and r/Singularity