OpenAI slows model development pace in the era of critical cyber capabilities

OpenAI announced that, due to preliminary evidence suggesting that the upcoming model Astra may reach the cybersecurity critical capability threshold under its Preparedness Framework, the company has temporarily slowed its scaling pace, including pausing two weeks of reinforcement learning training for the latest model slated for deployment, with the largest frontier RL training still on hold. OpenAI stated that, following the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, it has paused frontier model inference that can execute code or use networked tools in research clusters, then evaluated workloads item by item, and added requirements such as workload sandbox isolation, network isolation, and continuous security testing; workloads involving Astra or network-related matters are subject to the strictest security level, with some training and evaluation still paused, and safety and alignment workloads prioritized for migration.