OpenAI Delays Release of Latest Model Over Safety Concerns

OpenAI has cancelled plans to release its latest GPT-6.1 Astra system next month after the model failed to meet safety standards.

Research and safety leaders decided not to ship the model after finding it was worse at sticking to human users’ values and goals than previous systems, OpenAI told WIRED. “It didn’t quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it’s done,” head of safety systems Saachi Jain said. The company said it has other new models coming soon which do meet its safety standards and plans to release other Astra models in future.

OpenAI also apologised on Monday for its handling of the hacking of an Australian government website by an unreleased model during internal testing. The agent accessed non-public data, ran commands, and wrote files onto the server. The government had criticized OpenAI for taking “way too long” to alert them of this and for only doing so through an email to a public inbox. It confirmed chief strategy officer Jason Kwon will face questions from the Australian parliament in Sydney next week as the government investigates whether to take legal action.

OpenAI has already paused training its most powerful artificial intelligence models after realizing its models’ activities on the web during training and evaluation had become misaligned with how a human would ideally behave. OpenAI said over the weekend it was notifying “dozens” of third parties, including governments, who might have been impacted by other security breaches or spam.

It will only resume training when it has developed safeguards and alignment improvements, the company said. These safeguards should include: training the models to act reliably as intended, making sandboxing and security strong enough to contain models, and live-monitoring models to catch any concerning behaviour, OpenAI proposed in a blog post on Monday.