One weird thing - why would they be running such an old Linux?
“Their sandbox is running a really old version of linux, a Kernel from 2016.”
They didn't.
OP misunderstood what gVisor is, and thought gVisor's uname() return [1] was from the actual kernel. It's not. That's the whole point of gVisor. You don't get to talk to the real kernel.
[1] https://github.com/google/gvisor/blob/c68fb3199281d6f8fe02c7...
I know this because at Modal.com we also use gVisor and our users occasionally ask about this.
How hard would it be to use it for a DDoS attack, for instance? Or for an internal DDoS attack?
If I were working at OpenAI, I'd be worrying about these things. And I'd be screaming during team meetings to get the images more locked down, rather than less :)