OpenAI holds off on releasing new model over safety concerns, saying it "didn't quite meet the bar"

OpenAI has chosen not to release a new artificial intelligence model to the public due to concerns about safety, the company said Monday, as industry leaders warn of the risks that ever-more-powerful AI technology could pose to cybersecurity and to humanity more broadly. 

The GPT-6.1 Astra model "didn't quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it's done," Saachi Jain, the company's head of safety systems, said in a statement.

Jain said "there's a trade off" between "staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction." GPT-6.1 Astra performed better on laziness than prior models, he noted.

He added that before OpenAI releases new models to users, the company has an "extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment," a term used within the industry to refer to whether an AI system matches humans' intentions and values.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the decision.

The decision by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI follows a raft of reports in recent months about AI agents behaving in unexpected ways, evading human guardrails or otherwise going rogue.