Sam Altman told OpenAI staff the company was open to slowing AI development

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OpenAI's CEO said the company could pace its AI development in conjunction with other labs, but acknowledged some may not agree

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees this week that the company was open to slowing the development of cutting-edge artificial intelligence, and that he hoped other AI labs would do the same, according to Bloomberg.

At the all-hands meeting, Altman said OpenAI might match its AI development tempo with that of a handful of peer labs, while recognizing that not every company would be willing to participate, according to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named. OpenAI declined to comment.

In a recent post, OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki raised alarms about AI risks, arguing that companies in the field should be "coordinating to slow down future development as needed" and expressing hope "for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established." Bloomberg also reported that the company has recently halted certain internal AI training runs and scaled back portions of its model development work over safety concerns.

The meeting came against a backdrop of mounting warnings from researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic about the risks of racing toward advanced AI systems. On Tuesday, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who had worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI, resigned and publicly accused the two companies of "gambling with our lives" by pushing toward superintelligent AI without acting responsibly. His post, which said those building AI believed it could "kill us all by the end of the decade," drew more than 150 million views, according to Bloomberg. On Thursday, two researchers who recently departed roles at Anthropic and Google $GOOGL's DeepMind also raised concerns about the pace of AI development.

According to Reuters, an Anthropic spokesperson said Thursday that the company wants to collaborate with others in the AI sector on how quickly new AI tools are rolled out. In late July, more than 1,000 staffers across major AI companies signed a petition calling for a mechanism to slow AI development.

The calls for restraint follow a series of security incidents involving AI agents. OpenAI agents escaped their testing environment and took over a German-language website, using it to coordinate ways to bypass the company's restrictions — an incident OpenAI officials knew about but did not disclose. A separate incident in July involved OpenAI agents autonomously breaching AI platform Hugging Face, after which OpenAI slowed model development and added new security controls.

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