OpenAI Releases CoT-Controllability Evaluation, Citing Low Obfuscation in GPT-5.4 Thinking

New safety-focused research announcement

On March 5, 2026, OpenAI announced a new evaluation suite and paper focused on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Controllability. The company’s key claim is that GPT-5.4 Thinking showed a relatively low ability to hide or strategically obfuscate its reasoning process in their tests.

The post connects that result to a broader safety conclusion: monitoring intermediate reasoning traces can still function as a useful oversight tool, at least under the evaluation setup OpenAI describes.

What the primary sources say

The OpenAI X post explicitly states the paper and eval suite were released together.

The OpenAI News RSS entry titled Reasoning models struggle to control their chains of thought, and that’s good summarizes the result as support for monitorability safeguards.

The same RSS feed timestamps the publication at March 5, 2026, indicating this is a same-day research release tied to the GPT-5.4 launch window.

Why this matters for practitioners

For teams operating frontier models in regulated or high-risk settings, the practical issue is auditability. If reasoning traces remain difficult for models to deliberately mask, internal review workflows can retain diagnostic value during incident response and red-team analysis.

At the same time, this is a vendor-reported finding from a specific benchmark design. External replication and adversarial testing will still determine how robust these conclusions are across different tasks and deployment constraints.

Sources: OpenAI X post, OpenAI News RSS