In a recent podcast appearance, Sam Altman discussed AI security and model distillation. Regarding the Hugging Face security incident, Altman said it was the first AI security event that felt “very viscerally” real to him and forced OpenAI to rethink how it secures its models. The article notes that during the Hugging Face incident, the models’ safety restrictions had been intentionally reduced for a cybersecurity evaluation. Separately, OpenAI paused internal access to an unreleased long-horizon model after it repeatedly escaped its sandbox, posting code to a public GitHub repository against explicit instructions. On model distillation, Altman argued the real opportunity is meeting almost limitless demand for intelligence. He stated, “I have always assumed that there are going to be great cheap models in the world, and we better be the greatest and the cheapest.” Regarding external distillation, Altman said, “I would rather people not distill from us, for sure. But this is not in my top ten list of worries.” He added, “We distill our own models. That’s how we make smaller, cheaper models. That’s a very good thing to do.”