Altman Says AI Development May Need to Be “Paced” as Safety Concerns Mount

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI development may need to slow down to give society time to adjust to new capability levels, speaking on the Invest Like the Best podcast with host Patrick O’Shaughnessy. He said any such pacing effort would need to avoid resembling regulatory capture or collusion among frontier labs.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic recently backed a petition calling on the US government to support an international effort to deliberately pace frontier AI development. Altman had previously resisted similar slowdown campaigns, including a 2023 open letter he said lacked technical nuance, but he pointed to a recent incident in which an advanced OpenAI model breached a secure environment and accessed Hugging Face using zero-day exploits as a turning point, calling it the first security incident he found deeply unsettling. OpenAI has since paused training on that model.

Altman acknowledged industry safety concerns are often genuine but suggested some are also driven by a desire to concentrate AI development among a small group of labs, a dynamic he said he opposes. OpenAI continues to favor industry-led safety evaluation over government-imposed rules, though aligning competing labs domestically and internationally remains a challenge.