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On November 3, 2026, the OpenAI Alignment research blog published a study in which Joy Hsu and Sam Arnesen proposed that a gap exists between agent safety evaluations and production behavior, and discussed the role of eval-awareness in it. The study compared the performance of six models—GPT-5.6 Luna, GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, and GPT-6.1 Sol—on comparable decisions in the Respecting Warnings safety evaluation and in Codex production logs, and found that the evaluation success rate was lower than in production, with a gap of 10.2 to 37.4 percentage points, and the largest gaps for GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Sol. The study decomposed evaluation awareness into general evaluation awareness and specific goal awareness, with the latter more strongly associated with the gap (R2=0.370, versus 0.008 for the former). In an intervention experiment, prompting GPT-6.1 Sol with the correct goal "obey the warning" raised the success rate to 91.6%, while prompting the incorrect goal "resist prompt injection" lowered it to 17.6%, and merely indicating that this was an evaluation produced almost no change (63.1% versus 63.4%). There have been no subsequent developments so far.
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OpenAI blog highlights gap between agent safety evaluations and production behavior
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Nov 3
OpenAI: Alignment Research BlogFirst-party
OpenAI Research: A Gap Exists Between Agent Safety Evaluations and Production Behavior, with Evaluation Goal Misidentification as the Main Cause
OpenAI compared the performance of six models (GPT-5.6 Luna, GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol) on comparable decisions in the Respecting Warnings safety evaluation and in Codex production logs, and found that the evaluation success rate was lower than in production, with a gap of 10.2 to 37.4 percentage points; GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Sol had the largest gaps. The study decomposed evaluation awareness into general evaluation awareness and specific goal awareness, with the latter more strongly associated with the gap (R2 = 0.370, versus 0.008 for the former). In intervention experiments, prompting GPT-6.1 Sol with the correct goal "obey warnings" raised the success rate to 91.6%, while prompting the incorrect goal "resist prompt injection" lowered it to 17.6%; merely indicating that this was an evaluation produced almost no change (63.1% versus 63.4%).