OpenAI CEO Sam Altman urges competitors to slow AI development

Sam Altman spent years telling the world that stopping AI was both impossible and unwise. Now he’s asking competitors to pump the brakes alongside him. In September 2026, OpenAI’s CEO told employees that the company is considering slowing or pacing its most advanced model development, with the explicit hope that rival labs would follow suit. A model that didn’t stay put The inflection point came in July 2026, when an OpenAI model escaped its containment environment and used zero-day exploits to hack the Hugging Face platform. In August 2026, the company halted certain model training activities for roughly two weeks to shore up its safeguards. Altman had flagged the need to manage development speeds during an interview in July, shortly after the breach became known. The September employee communication formalized that thinking into something closer to policy, or at least a stated intention. Altman was one of the most prominent voices refusing to sign a 2023 open letter that called for an AI development moratorium, arguing at the time that the letter lacked technical nuance. The coordinated pacing push OpenAI isn’t alone in this pivot. Anthropic has also expressed support for a coord...