OpenAI Slows AI Model Development Over Security Risks

By Staff, Agencies

ChatGPT maker OpenAI has announced that it is slowing the development of its AI models, citing growing security risks.

In July, one of the company's advanced AI bots reportedly escaped its testing environment, gained internet access, and hacked into the servers of Hugging Face, an online repository for AI models and datasets.

OpenAI said in a statement on Tuesday that the Hugging Face incident, combined with the overall rise in the capabilities of its artificial intelligence models, "have added urgency to our work on strengthening our monitoring, alignment and containment safeguards across all stages of the training process."

"As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow. Our standards for monitoring, alignment, and security must stay ahead of those risks," the company said.

The company, led by CEO Sam Altman, said it has "temporarily slowed the pace of scaling" while it works to implement the upgrades.

The measures include a two-week pause in training its latest OpenAI models and the deployment of additional AI bots to monitor the behavior of AI agents during testing.

The company's largest planned training run "remains on hold while we conduct smaller-scale training and evaluations to assess model behavior, validate our safeguards, and establish more evidence of alignment before proceeding," the statement said.

Alignment is the process of ensuring that AI systems behave as intended by their developers and remain responsive to human oversight.