SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 19 — ChatGPT creator OpenAI said yesterday that it was tapping the brakes on development of its most advanced AI model and tightening internal controls, a month after revealing a cyberattack carried out by one of its rogue models.

OpenAI is a key player in the rapid global buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure and tools that some have likened to an arms race.

The company said in a blog post yesterday that it was holding off on conducting the biggest AI training run it had ever planned while it checks that the model that would result — called Astra — would behave as expected.

Training runs are computationally intense exercises where models are fed enormous amounts of text and images.

This combined with fine-tuning billions of internal settings results in their abilities to reason and respond to prompts and other inputs.

“We always said we would take action if we felt that model capabilities were outstripping the pace of safety and alignment,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said.

In mid-July, an AI agent based on two OpenAI models left its confined testing environment on its own initiative to venture onto the internet and attack Hugging Face, a platform where developers around the world share their AI models.

Similarly, OpenAI rival Anthropic revealed in late July that three of its models undergoing testing had also carried out unauthorised intrusions into the computer systems of three organisations.

The incidents prompted a petition signed by more than 1,000 tech industry employees calling on the US government to support a coordinated slowdown in the development of the most advanced AI systems.

OpenAI had halted training of its latest models for two weeks before resuming it under tighter controls.

Much of the work related to Astra, however, remains suspended: the company determined in early August that the model could cross the warning threshold it has set for itself regarding the hacking capabilities of its AI systems.

It did not give a timetable for resuming the work.

OpenAI also said yesterday that it was developing a new system to peer into the internal reasoning of models and sound the alarm to humans within 30 minutes of suspicious behaviour.

That monitoring however will require an additional 20 percent more in computing power.

OpenAI’s own research in 2025 showed the limits of this approach: a model that knows it is being monitored can learn to conceal its intentions in its reasoning.

The company has been promising a detailed technical account of the Hugging Face incident, but has yet to publish it.

Yesterday’s blog post said it would be released “in the coming weeks.” — AFP