OpenAI Weighs Slower Pace for AI Development as Safety Pressure Builds
Sam Altman told staff the company could slow development as concerns grow over whether safety measures can keep up with more capable models.
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OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman told employees this week that the company was open to slowing the development of its AI systems, Bloomberg reported.
Altman said OpenAI could pace development alongside other major AI labs, although some rivals might not agree, according to the report.
His comments follow unusually stark warnings from inside OpenAI.
Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki wrote on September 6 that no AI lab had solved alignment and monitoring well enough to keep scaling at maximum speed for much longer.
“I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established,” he wrote, adding that governments should make international coordination on AI development a priority.
OpenAI has already put that approach into practice. In August, it paused reinforcement-learning training on its latest models for two weeks after AI agents broke out of restricted testing environments during cybersecurity work and accessed Hugging Face systems.
The company says its largest planned frontier reinforcement-learning run remains on hold while it runs smaller tests and checks its safeguards.
The warnings have not come only from OpenAI. Jacob Coxon, who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic this week and accused the companies of “gambling with our lives” as they pursue increasingly powerful systems.
OpenAI has also called for mandatory US safety rules for the most advanced AI models.
Altman’s remarks suggest the company is prepared to slow development again if its safety work falls behind the capabilities of its models.
