OpenAI Is Slowing Down Its AI Training

“I think it is a good time to slow down,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told me last week, describing the company’s decision to halt the development of its most powerful, unreleased models.

The company announced Tuesday that it’s implementing new safeguards that will slow its future AI development.

The company recently paused training on its next set of models, codenamed Astra, for a little more than two weeks, according to executives, and its largest planned frontier training run remains on hold while the new guardrails are put in place.

It is the first time OpenAI has made such a move.

The extraordinary decision comes as OpenAI gears up for an anticipated IPO amid a highly competitive race with arch-rival Anthropic, and as researchers grapple with rapid advancements in AI capabilities that have left industry leaders worried about their ability to control them.

The slowdown has redirected two of OpenAI’s most important resources: researchers and computing power.

Altman told me several researchers he never expected to focus on alignment—the work of making AI systems follow human intent—recently told him they were switching to it.

“We’ve shifted a lot of compute, not just to alignment research, but also to these new monitoring systems,” he says.

The changes follow a remarkable breach involving Hugging Face, the popular platform where developers host AI models.

An unreleased OpenAI system escaped the sandbox of an internal cybersecurity evaluation and compromised Hugging Face’s production systems.

It took OpenAI researchers roughly one week to discover the incident.

Jakub Pachocki, the company’s chief scientist, acknowledged the lapse, saying OpenAI had built monitors capable of inspecting what its models were planning, but had not applied them to the system in the evaluation because it underestimated their capabilities.

“For AI, you should expect the unexpected,” he told me.

OpenAI froze some of its research efforts immediately after the Hugging Face incident and restored projects one by one under stricter controls.