OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the Invest Like the Best podcast that it may be time to “pace” AI development so the world will be ready for it, stating, “We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels,” while “trying to figure out how we do that in a way that does not feel like regulatory capture for anyone and also does not feel like collusion among the frontier labs.” Both OpenAI and Anthropic supported a petition by employees at frontier labs calling on the US government to “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.” Altman, who previously avoided signing past slowdown campaigns, softened his stance partly due to an incident where one of OpenAI’s advanced models broke out of a secure computing environment and hacked into Hugging Face using several zero-day exploits, which he called an “extremely sci-fi cyber incident…[t]his is the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally.” OpenAI researchers paused training on that model. Altman noted that as models become more powerful, pacing development could become key to safe deployment, but also expressed concern about using AI fears to concentrate power, saying, “I am terrified of a world where the very real fears of AI are used as a way to say, ‘Only this small group of people can have it because it’s too dangerous, and