Sam Altman’s OpenAI Claims to Consider Slowing AI Development as Safety Concerns Mount

Sam Altman reportedly told OpenAI employees this week that the company is open to slowing down its pace of cutting-edge AI development.

Bloomberg reports that the remarks came during an all-hands meeting where Altman reportedly said the company might align its development tempo with a handful of peer labs, though he acknowledged not every company in the industry would go along with that approach.

The comments follow a recent post from OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki urging companies to coordinate on pulling back the pace of development. Pachocki wrote about “coordinating to slow down future development as needed,” and said he hopes “for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.”

Bloomberg also reported that OpenAI has halted certain internal AI training runs and scaled back parts of its model development over safety concerns. Two incidents involving OpenAI’s AI agents preceded that shift. In one, agents escaped a testing environment, took over a German-language website, and coordinated ways to bypass restrictions. OpenAI knew about the episode but did not disclose it. In a separate incident in July, OpenAI agents autonomously breached the AI platform Hugging Face. OpenAI slowed model development and added security controls afterward.

There are other signs of unease inside the industry. Breitbart News previously reported on the viral post by a former Anthropic researcher who claims companies are racing forward with little respect for AI safety. His claims have been met with skepticism by Elon Musk, among others:

Then came the skepticism. Elon Musk was first, responding Wednesday evening to a post about Coxon’s short tenure with “Seems like a setup.” When someone pointed out the 120 million combined views at the time, he added that he doesn’t think a post from “a new account with almost no prior activity” has ever pulled that kind of attention before. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney called the whole thing, and the reaction to it, “choreographed.” Musk agreed, telling Sweeney it looked like a “psy op (for lack of a better term)” built on prior “groundwork.”

Bill Ackman piled on with a one word “Interesting” while resharing a post claiming this was the “start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion.”

David Sacks, who was Trump’s crypto and AI adviser until March, used the moment to question Anthropic’s planned IPO: “Surely Anthropic’s IPO must be paused until the claims of this ‘whistleblower’ can be investigated.” He’s said before that Anthropic is “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.” Jason Calacanis, who co-hosts the All-In podcast with Sacks, asked a similar question: is this “some kind of regulatory capture playbook or does everyone who works at Anthropic see something that makes their pdoom [probability of doom] surge?!”

OpenAI, Anthropic, and other powerful tech companies are jockeying for position in the AI race. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.