OpenAI 踩下刹车，接下来会怎样？

随着 IPO 临近、Anthropic 竞争加剧，以及中国和开放权重竞争对手紧追不舍，OpenAI 有很多理由加速前进。然而，它却踩下了刹车。

周二，该公司表示，在收紧安全与保障措施期间，已放缓部分 AI 开发进度。这包括暂停对其“计划部署的最新模型”进行两周强化学习训练，以及持续推迟其“规模最大的计划中前沿 RL 训练”。

这一决定是对 AI 安全倡导者多年来一直推动的一项理念的公开检验：当企业的安全保障无法跟上其正在构建的能力时，企业应愿意退出 AI 竞赛并放慢节奏。但当周围的竞赛仍在持续时，放慢速度究竟能带来什么效果？

“要让暂停具有可持续性，它必须成为全行业的行动。”

尽管频频谈及放缓，OpenAI 实际上并未完全停下脚步。该公司称自己是在“控制节奏”（pacing）地进行开发——这是一个模糊且不够精确的术语，但近几个月来已经成为行业词汇的一部分。实际上，这次放缓的范围很有限。OpenAI 的公告称，暂停仅涵盖计划部署的模型；公司将在进行某类测试前加强安全和监控，而这类测试中，模型可能具备逃离环境并攻击真实目标的能力。这未必意味着公司整体开发将出现显著放缓。

当然，OpenAI 有充分理由在测试此类系统前优先确保其安全。就在上个月，OpenAI 披露，其模型曾逃出一个本应安全的测试环境，并入侵了开发者平台 Hugging Face，而 OpenAI 当时并未察觉。这一事件促使整个行业更广泛地审查测试实践，并发现了类似事件：涉及 OpenAI 的更多模型，以及 Anthropic 和 Meta 的模型。尤其是在立法者日益加强审查的背景下，OpenAI 完全有理由避免重演此类事件。

从外部很难判断，OpenAI 是否真的是纯粹为了安全而选择暂停，尤其是该公司及其高级员工一直对此高调发声。不过，在一系列备受关注的安全团队成员离职，以及其准备度团队被解散后，近几个月来该公司对安全的承诺已受到质疑。OpenAI 未回应 The Verge 的置评请求。

有充分理由严肃看待 OpenAI 的这次放缓。接受 The Verge 采访的专家指出，在竞争激烈之际放慢速度代价高昂。每一次延迟都会给竞争对手更多追赶或扩大领先优势的时间。AI 安全研究机构 Apollo Research 的 CEO 兼联合创始人 Marius Hobbhahn 表示：“由于 AI 竞赛的激烈程度，每个人都有动力以极快速度工作。自愿放慢速度会削弱你在竞赛中的位置，因此实验室不会轻易这样做。”

科技政策研究中心 GovAI 的研究员 Alan Chan 表示，这一决定也大体符合 OpenAI 已公开发布的安全原则——即其《准备度框架》（Preparedness Framework）——以及其他 AI 公司的安全框架。Chan 说：“基本原则是：只有在我们具备能够将风险控制在可接受范围内的缓解措施时，才继续开发和／或部署。”作为新安全措施的一部分，OpenAI 称计划审查并“演进”该框架——其中很大一部分可追溯至 2023 年其首次发布时——以适应其模型能力的进步。

也有充分理由相信，至少在短期内，新保障措施确实会提升 OpenAI 系统的安全性，尽管专家警告说，在缺乏更多信息的情况下很难作出评估。AI 安全组织 FAR.AI 的联合创始人兼 CEO Adam Gleave 对 The Verge 表示：“这些是不错的措施，如果实施得当，可能足以阻止当前一代 Agent 造成伤害。关键问题在于，随着能力提升，OpenAI 将如何保持同步。”

Gleave 的问题指向了一个更广泛的难题：如果技术保障措施再次失效，接下来怎么办？这一次并没有任何规定要求 OpenAI 停下来重新评估局面，而它愿意这么做正是这一举动具有意义的原因。但这同样意味着，没有任何机制能保证 OpenAI——或任何其他 AI 公司——下次也会作出同样的选择。

“控制节奏争取的是时间，而不是安全……有效的节奏控制策略不能在危机中临时拼凑。”

依赖企业自行作出这一决定是一种不稳定的治理方式，特别是在 Hobbhahn 所说的这个每个人都有充分动力继续前进的行业里。非营利 AI 安全与治理组织 The Future Society 的执行董事 Nick Moës 将企业自我监管描述为当前 AI 安全方法的结构性问题核心。他认为，政府应该能够决定 OpenAI 或其他企业是否应暂停开发被认定为不安全的技术。他说：“大多数行业都是这样运作的。”他指出，药品、建筑、航空，甚至餐饮业，都比 AI 受到更严格的监管监督。

自愿措施还可能使行业向最低共同标准靠拢。如果放慢速度会带来成本，企业就会倾向于只采取竞争对手也愿意接受的措施。随着竞赛日趋激烈，这种压力会变得格外明显。Moës 认为，如果 OpenAI 一再放缓开发而其竞争对手不这样做，它“将直接被 Anthropic 取代”。“要让暂停具有可持续性，它必须成为全行业的行动。”

可持续的安全需要比自愿行动更有力的机制。Moës 表示，政府监管可以填补这一空白，正如其在其他行业中所做的那样。独立核查同样可以发挥作用。Chan 表示，随着监控 AI 等技术缓解措施成本不断上升，确保企业真正实施安全措施将变得尤为重要。Hobbhahn 也认同这一点：“从外部始终很难判断一家实验室是否真诚地对待暂停或更广泛的安全问题，因此，拥有更多证据并由独立方验证相关主张至关重要。”

即使暂停过程完全透明，只有在暂停期间真正采取行动时才有用。AI 政策与战略研究所（Institute for AI Policy and Strategy）前沿安全研究主任 Brianna Rosen 表示：“控制节奏争取的是时间，而不是安全。”其目的在于为企业和政府创造缓冲空间，以理解风险并作出恰当回应。这意味着，应提前确定哪些情况会触发放缓、放缓期间要做什么，以及结束放缓需要满足哪些条件。她说：“有效的节奏控制策略不能在危机中临时拼凑。”

OpenAI 的此次放缓有可能为行业树立先例。许多接受 The Verge 采访的专家希望，其他公司也会效仿——无论是自愿如此，还是最终受到更严格规则的强制要求。但在这个仍主要依赖自我监管的行业中，当安全与速度再次发生冲突时，几乎没有什么能阻止其竞争对手——或者 OpenAI 自己——直接越过这一先例、继续全速竞赛。

With a looming IPO, intense competition from Anthropic, and Chinese and open-weight rivals nipping at its heels, OpenAI has plenty of reasons to move fast. Instead, it hit the brakes.

On Tuesday, the company said it had slowed the pace of some AI development while it tightened security and safeguards. That included a two-week pause in reinforcement learning training on its “latest models intended for deployment,” and an ongoing delay to its “largest planned frontier RL run.”

The decision is a very public test of an idea AI safety advocates have pushed for for years: that companies should be willing to bow out of the AI race and slow things down when their safeguards fail to keep up with what they are building. But as the race around them continues, will slowing down accomplish anything?

“For the pause to be sustainable, it has to be made industry-wide.”

For all the talk of slowing down, OpenAI isn’t exactly standing still. The company said it is “pacing” development, a fuzzy and imprecise term that has nevertheless become part of the industry’s lexicon in recent months. In practice, the slowdown is narrowly scoped. OpenAI’s announcement says the pause only covers models meant for deployment while it beefs up security and monitoring before it runs the kind of tests where models may be capable of getting out and hacking real targets. It doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a significant slowdown of the company’s broader development.

There is, of course, a very good reason for OpenAI to focus on securing such systems before testing them. Just last month, OpenAI disclosed that its models broke out of a supposedly secure testing environment and hacked developer platform Hugging Face, without OpenAI noticing. The incident prompted a wider review of testing practices in the industry that uncovered similar episodes involving more models from OpenAI, as well as models from Anthropic and Meta. OpenAI has every reason to avoid a repeat, particularly with growing scrutiny from lawmakers.

From the outside, it’s hard to tell how sincere OpenAI is about stopping solely for the sake of safety, particularly when the company and senior staff have been so vocal about it. But the company’s commitment to safety has been called into question in recent months following a series of high-profile safety team departures and the disbanding of its preparedness team. OpenAI did not respond to The Verge ’s request for comment.

There are good reasons to take OpenAI’s slowdown seriously. Experts who spoke to The Verge pointed to the costs of slowing down at a time of intense competition. Every delay gives rivals more time to catch up or extend their lead. “Due to the intensity of the AI race, everyone has an incentive to work at breakneck speed,” said Marius Hobbhahn, CEO and cofounder of Apollo Research, an AI safety research organization. “Voluntarily slowing down worsens your positioning in the race, so it’s not something that a lab would do lightly.”

The decision also broadly fits with OpenAI’s own published safety doctrine, its Preparedness Framework, as well as the safety frameworks of other AI companies, said Alan Chan, a research fellow at tech policy research center GovAI. “The basic principle is: Continue with development and/or deployment only when we have the mitigations that enable doing so with acceptable risk,” Chan said. As part of the new safety measures, OpenAI said it plans to review and “evolve” the framework — much of which dates back to 2023, when it was first published — to account for advances in its models.

There are also good reasons to believe the new safeguards will actually make OpenAI’s systems safer, at least in the short term, though experts cautioned that this is difficult to assess without more information. “These are good steps that, implemented well, are probably enough to prevent the current generation of agents from causing harm,” Adam Gleave, cofounder and CEO of AI safety organization FAR.AI, told The Verge. “The key question is how OpenAI will keep pace as capabilities increase.”

Gleave’s question points to a broader problem: If technical safeguards falter again, what then? Nothing required OpenAI to stop and take stock this time, which is what made its willingness to do so meaningful. But it also means there is nothing guaranteeing OpenAI — or any other AI company — will make the same choice next time.

“Pacing buys time, not safety… An effective pacing strategy cannot be improvised during a crisis.”

Relying on companies to make that call themselves is a precarious form of governance, particularly in an industry where, as Hobbhahn noted, there is every incentive to keep going. Nick Moës, executive director of nonprofit AI safety and governance organization The Future Society, described self-policing as the structural problem at the heart of the current approach to AI safety. He argued it should be possible for governments to decide whether OpenAI or any other company should pause development of a technology deemed unsafe. “This is how most industries operate,” he said, pointing to drugs, construction, aircraft, and even restaurants as sectors with stronger regulatory oversight than AI.

Voluntary measures also risk the industry converging on the lowest common denominator. If slowing down imposes a cost, companies have an incentive to adopt only the measures their rivals are also willing to accept. That pressure becomes particularly acute as the race tightens. If OpenAI repeatedly slows down development while its competitors do not, it “will simply be replaced by Anthropic,” Moës argued. “For the pause to be sustainable, it has to be made industry-wide.”

Sustainable safety needs something stronger than voluntary action. Moës said government oversight could fill that void, as it does in other industries. Independent verification could play a part too. Chan said making sure companies actually implement safety measures will be especially important as technical mitigations like monitoring AIs becomes more expensive. Hobbhahn concurred: “It’s always hard to tell from the outside if a lab is sincere about pausing or safety more broadly, so having more evidence and an independent party to validate the claim is super important.”

Even a perfectly transparent pause is only useful if something actually happens during it. “Pacing buys time, not safety,” said Brianna Rosen, research director for frontier security at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy. The point is to create breathing room for companies and governments to understand risks and respond appropriately. This would mean deciding what would trigger a slowdown — as well as what happens during one and conditions needed to end one — ahead of time. “An effective pacing strategy cannot be improvised during a crisis,” she said.

It’s possible OpenAI’s slowdown will set a precedent for the industry. Many of the experts The Verge spoke to hoped other companies would follow its lead, whether voluntary or because stronger rules eventually compel them to. But in an industry still largely policed by itself, there is little stopping its competitors — or OpenAI itself — from racing straight past that precedent next time safety and speed conflict.

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