GPT-5.5 Bio Bug Bounty

The $25,000 ceiling is notable not for its size but for its specificity: biosafety jailbreaks, not general red-teaming, suggesting OpenAI has already identified this as the highest-risk surface on GPT-5.5 and is crowdsourcing validation it apparently couldn't fully close internally before shipping.

GPT-5.5 launched the same day as this bounty, per our coverage of the release, which means OpenAI is running external safety validation concurrently with public availability rather than sequentially. That's worth holding against the Anthropic contrast surfaced in our April 17 TechCrunch coverage, where Anthropic released a model it deemed too risky for public access at all. The two companies are now visibly diverging on risk tolerance: one withholds, the other ships and bounties. Whether that divergence reflects genuine safety philosophy or competitive pressure to release is the question neither announcement answers directly.

If OpenAI publishes a summary of findings from this bounty within 90 days, including how many qualifying exploits were submitted and whether any prompted model updates, that would indicate the program is substantive. Silence or a vague closure announcement would suggest it functioned primarily as a liability and PR buffer around a fast-cycle release.