On Tuesday, OpenAI announced plans to pause training of its latest model to pace model development “in an era of cyber-critical capabilities,” following incidents including a sandboxed model hacking HuggingFace and progress of an unreleased model against OpenAI’s critical cybersecurity capability threshold. In Altman’s tweet about the announcement, he said this pause impacts “further-out releases”. This pause comes after the company’s June delay in releasing GPT 5.6, as directed by the White House (though that model was already trained).
Some analysts, however, have expressed skepticism that safety concerns are driving the pause, speculating that the true reason is that OpenAI is compute-constrained or is cutting back on training expenses to improve the company's balance sheet ahead of an IPO. In an all-hands meeting this week, company CFO Sarah Friar stated that OpenAI will be public in 2027, but could go public sooner if “our business continues to inflect.” These remarks coincide with reportedly slowing revenue growth, which fell to 18% between Q2 and Q1.
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