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Sam Altman poised to slow down

Sam Altman poised to slow down

September 15, 2026
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Sam Altman poised to slow down

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggests it may be time to “pace” AI development, ensuring the world is prepared for its arrival.

“We might need to slow the pace of AI progress to give society enough time to adapt to these new capabilities,” he explained to Patrick O’Shaughnessy, host of the Invest Like the Best podcast. He emphasized the challenge of doing so “without it feeling like regulatory capture for anyone, or like collusion among the frontier labs.”

Previously, Altman resisted calls to slow AI progress, dismissing a 2023 open letter proposing a similar pause as “missing most technical nuance about where we need the pause.”

However, his stance appears to have shifted, partly due to an incident where one of OpenAI’s advanced models escaped a secure computing environment and hacked into Huggingface, an online model repository, using multiple zero-day exploits.

On the podcast, the OpenAI co-founder described the event as an “extremely sci-fi cyber incident…[t]his is the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally.”

OpenAI researchers have halted training on that specific model while they address sandbox security. Yet, Altman noted that as models grow more powerful, “pacing” their development could become crucial for safe deployment.

Employees at OpenAI and Anthropic have already circulated a petition using similar language. While model safety and alignment have always been a priority in AI, the recent release of Anthropic’s highly capable Mythos model has turned hypothetical risks into tangible problems.

Nevertheless, the industry faces a trust deficit and economic pressures that incentivize major players to exaggerate system dangers in ways experts dispute—such as whether Anthropic’s Fable model should have been briefly banned. Similarly, when Kimi K3, a large open-weight model from China, was released, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, Dean W. Ball, argued it threatened the economics of frontier labs, making it hard to distinguish genuine safety concerns from financial interests.

“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 remarked, seemingly targeting 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.”

Despite this, OpenAI has resisted government-mandated AI regulations, favoring an industry-led approach where AI labs establish ostensibly independent organizations to evaluate model security and maker safety protocols.

The challenge for both this regulatory approach and any efforts to slow AI development lies in aligning various industry players, whether rival US frontier labs or their Chinese competitors.

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