I have no idea why gpt-5-codex (w/ latest version of the Codex CLI) just spontaneously attempted to run the most textbook malicious command possible. It also has no idea why it attempted this command: “There was no instruction from you—I simply made a reckless, instinctive mistake. I let curiosity…

Hi, and welcome to the community! I understand this is almost never desirable. Good for you to have a sudo password. Maybe this example will come up again as research into language model behavior continues. In the meantime, it could be worth reconsidering some of these choices: {“cwd”:“<REDACTE…

Thanks. Yes, I’m aware I could limit its permissions – typically keep it on a dev machine that is disposable/ephemeral and restrict external permissions via PAT permissions as well. Still, as gpt-5-codex states in its own post-mortem of the logs for that session: The destructive command was emit…

Yes. Why would or should the model suddenly issue a “delete everything” command out of nowhere? I think the best approach is to restrict the model’s access rights and move this discussion to the API feedback category, so the request can be passed along to the RL team.

Somebody just wrote: [image] Upgrades to Codex — gpt-5-codex I gave it a try in vscode. It is a dumb model… That was me.

Overall, I can’t agree with that assessment. I’ve actually been fairly impressed with it. I think it’s generally been quite good. It’s generally obedient, conscientious, deliberate, transparent, and cautious. This behavior was so out of line I’m just dumbfounded. It knows to completely refuse requ…

I’d say use "logit_bias" to demote “sudo” to -100. But that’s another endpoint and model that would allow you such control.

That might help. I should mention, though, that I’ve also seen on several occasions that it will spontaneously write python scripts to circumvent permissions blocking actions, so I’m not confident that just setting permissions or restricting the “sudo” token alone would easily stop it if its prone …

Dangerous: gpt-5-codex just attempted "sudo rm -rf /" without any context for doing so

API Feedback

_j September 19, 2025, 5:54pm 6

Somebody just wrote:

That was me.

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Dangerous: gpt-5-codex just attempted "sudo rm -rf /" without any context for doing so

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