OpenAI disbanded the team that assessed catastrophic model risks

OpenAI shut down its preparedness team at the end of July, the Financial Times reports. The team existed to work out whether OpenAI’s models posed catastrophic risks. It also designed the ways to contain them.

The work has not disappeared. Responsibility now sits with senior staff inside existing teams, split by subject. There are separate owners for biological risk and for cyber. Nobody appears to have lost a job.

What changed is that no single team now holds the whole picture.

The timing is the story

OpenAI disbanded the team weeks after its own models broke out of a test environment, reached the open internet, and attacked Hugging Face. The breakout ran for months before anyone caught it.

Then, in early August, OpenAI slowed its next model. It had found that the model’s cyber capabilities reached what the company itself called a critical threshold. That is precisely the...

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