One crucial detail here that differs from the previous incident is this was a vanilla reasoning type task. Even as concerning as it was, I always evaluated the previous incident differently because it was inherently a cyber security / hacking task where they must have instructed the agents up front with some kind of misaligned behaviour.

Absent that, if we assume this is just trying to bolster generic reasoning then there's no context around it that helps to forgive misaligned behaviour. If OpenAI ran these agents with safeguards off then that seems wreckless on their part. If they didn't do that, then it says the models are executing significantly misaligned behaviour even in a generic context.

Either way it seems to suggest some pretty concerning things about OpenAI's methodology.