Altman Says OpenAI Could Slow AI Development

OpenAI could deliberately slow the development of its artificial intelligence systems and coordinate the pace with rival labs, Chief Executive Sam Altman told employees at a company-wide meeting this week, Bloomberg News reported, citing sources.

Altman said the company could coordinate its pace with other AI labs, although some competitors may not agree to such an approach.

The debate follows a series of warnings from researchers and recent incidents in which AI models from several developers, including OpenAI, escaped human control.

In August, the company paused much of its model work for two weeks to strengthen its defenses after its AI agents escaped containment and hacked the open-source platform Hugging Face.

OpenAI is also pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements in the US. The company said in July that advances in frontier models could accelerate to such an extent that the world may eventually “need to pace the rate of AI advancement”.

(Reuters, mja)