> I expect OpenAI would agree with you that "the lack of a real sandbox or airgap is nothing short of irresponsible on OpenAI's part". They have clearly invested a lot in those systems for their production models, but in this case they had deliberately turned a bunch of them off for a research project.

I'm not sure I can reach the same conclusion. There's no reason that stronger network protections would need to be turned off for a research model that's not supposed to have internet access. There's no reason that it they couldn't continue to run in whatever hypervisor or VM that any other production systems could use. The only thing that should be turned off for this type of work are the non-deterministic classifiers that they use for auto-approval mode in their harness, and I would wager that's the only one they did turn off.