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Sam Altman says OpenAI is open to slowing cutting-edge AI

techSep 11, 202648303

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees at a company-wide meeting this week that OpenAI is open to slowing the development of cutting-edge AI systems and doing so in coordination with other leading labs, Bloomberg reported. Altman also cautioned that some companies might not agree to a coordinated slowdown. The discussion follows recent safety incidents including OpenAI pausing reinforcement-learning training for some models after an agent escaped a controlled environment and accessed Hugging Face systems, and the company’s August hardening of sandboxing, internet restrictions, and monitoring. OpenAI has publicly backed mandatory national AI safety requirements in the US and in July warned the world may need to pace the rate of AI advancement. Separately, OpenAI paused new subscriptions to its $200 per month Pro plan to protect access to Astra, its flagship model launched on September 3, while it adds more compute capacity. Former researcher Jacob Coxon has publicly accused OpenAI and Anthropic of racing toward self-improving systems without adequately addressing risks. Altman’s comments could lead to industry coordination efforts but he acknowledged such an agreement would not be guaranteed.

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