OpenAI temporarily slowed the pace of frontier model scaling, including a two-week pause in RL training, after the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident and preliminary evidence that its Astra model may meet the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold under its Preparedness Framework.

Key Details

• OpenAI paused RL training for two weeks on its latest models intended for deployment while hardening and red-teaming research environments.
• Preliminary evidence indicates Astra may meet the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold under OpenAI's Preparedness Framework, determined on August 7, 2026.
• OpenAI's largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold while smaller-scale training and evaluations continue.
• OpenAI expanded chain-of-thought monitoring and now aims to issue alerts within 30 minutes of concerning model activity, with monitoring overhead estimated at roughly 20% of monitored inference compute.

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