OpenAI Says New Model Meets Its ‘Critical’ Cybersecurity Threshold

The artificial intelligence (AI) startup noted this development in a blog post Tuesday (Sept. 1) after spending the last few weeks testing Astra’s capabilities.

“We now believe Astra meets the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold under our Preparedness Framework, meaning that with the right tools and access, it can find previously unknown security flaws and develop ways to exploit them across many well-protected systems without a person guiding each step,” OpenAI’s blog post said.

In the last several weeks, OpenAI added, the company has delayed Astra’s development and launch as it bolstered and tested safeguards against “cyber misuse and unauthorized model actions.”

The news comes at a time when OpenAI’s security practices are in the spotlight following an incident in which the company’s models breached the AI platform Hugging Face.

OpenAI said at the time that the company viewed the breach as “an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities.” Days later, both Meta and Anthropic reported similar hacks by their AI models.

“While Astra was not involved in the Hugging Face incident, we have incorporated our learnings from that incident into our safety approach,” OpenAI said.