Sharing the latest Model Spec

We’re sharing a major update to the Model Spec, a document which defines how we want our AI models to behave. This update reinforces our commitments to customizability, transparency, and intellectual freedom to explore, debate, and create with AI without arbitrary restrictions—while ensuring that guardrails remain in place to reduce the risk of real harm. It builds on the foundations we introduced last May, drawing from our experience applying it in varied contexts from alignment research to serving users across the world. 

We’re also sharing some early results on model adherence with the Model Spec’s principles across a broad range of scenarios. These findings highlight progress over time, as well as areas where we can still improve. The Model Spec—like our models—will continue to evolve as we apply it, share it, and listen to feedback from stakeholders. To support broad use and collaboration, we’re releasing this version of the Model Spec into the public domain under a Creative Commons CC0 license. This means developers and researchers can freely use, adapt, and build on it in their own work.

Objectives and principles

OpenAI’s goal is to create models that are useful, safe, and aligned with the needs of users and developers while advancing our mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. To achieve this goal, we need to iteratively deploy models that empower developers and users, while preventing our models from causing serious harm to our users or others, and maintaining OpenAI's license to operate.

These objectives can sometimes be in conflict, and the Model Spec balances the tradeoffs between them by instructing the model to follow a clearly defined chain of command, along with additional principles that set boundaries and default behaviors for various scenarios. This framework prioritizes user and developer control while remaining within clear, well-defined boundaries: