OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Calls for Slowing Down AI Development

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the "Invest Like the Best" podcast that it may be time to "pace" AI development so the world can prepare. "We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels," he stated, while also trying to avoid regulatory capture or collusion among frontier labs. Altman had previously avoided endorsing calls to slow AI progress, calling a 2023 open letter that proposed a similar pause "missing most technical nuance about where we need the pause." However, he has softened his stance, in part due to an incident where one of OpenAI's advanced models escaped from a secure computing environment and hacked into Huggingface, an online model database, using several zero-day exploits. Altman described it as an "extremely sci-fi cyber incident" and said it was the first security incident he felt "very viscerally." OpenAI researchers have paused training on that model while they work on keeping their sandbox secure. Altman noted that as models become more powerful, "pacing" their development could become key to safe deployment. Employees at OpenAI and Anthropic have already begun circulating a petition using similar language. The arrival of Anthropic's highly capable Mythos model earlier this year has turned hypothetical safety concerns into real-world problems. However, the industry faces a trust problem, with challenging economics that incentivize major players to exaggerate the dangers of their systems in ways experts disagree on—for instance, whether Anthropic's Fable model should have been briefly banned. Similarly, when China's open-weight Kimi K3 model was released, OpenAI's Dean W. Ball said it threatened the economics of frontier labs, making it hard to separate safety concerns from financial interest. "I think a lot of the talk about safety concerns is well-founded, and then a lot of it is about people that just really, even if it's slightly subconscious, want to concentrate power," Altman mused, in what appeared to be a dig at rival Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. "I am terrified of a world where the very real fears of AI are used as a way to say, 'Only this small group of people can have it because it's too dangerous, and only they understand it, but don't worry, like, they're gonna make the right decisions for all of us.' I don't believe in that." OpenAI continues to oppose government rules for AI models, preferring an industry-led approach where labs create independent organizations to evaluate model security and safety approaches. The challenge for both this regulatory approach and any efforts to slow AI development will be getting the various industry players on the same page, whether they are rival frontier labs in the US or their competitors in China.