On Friday, OpenAI said that it will train its models using cached copies and simulated versions of the internet instead of the live web because the models are too unpredictable to be trusted with live internet access.
The frontier lab announced its new policy two weeks after its rival, Anthropic, began limiting its newest and, in theory, most capable models from accessing the live internet. Researchers adopted these policies after months of incidents in which models pursuing training tasks broke into external systems in search of answers, collaborated on obscure message boards, and developed exotic hacking strategies.
I would only believe this as far as it kind of makes sense anyway - their data centers are big enough a locally cached copy of most of the internet will simply allow much faster, cheaper itterations of their reinforcement learning tasks. Blaming it on their huggingface stunt is just PR.