Why OpenAI's 'goblin' problem matters — and how you can release the goblins on your own

AI is more than a technology — it's magic.Don't believe me? Why, then, is one of the leading companies in the space, OpenAI, publishing entire official, corporate blog posts about goblins?To understand, we first have to go back to earlier this week, on Monday, April 27, 2026, when a developer under the handle @arb8020 on the social network X posted a snippet from the OpenAI open source Codex GitHub repository, specifically a file named models.json. Deep within the instructions for the new OpenAI large language model (LLM) GPT-5.5, a peculiar directive stood out, repeated four times for emphasis:"Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query."The discovery sent a shoc