OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently suggested it might be time to “pace the rate of AI development” to give society a chance to “harden around some of these new capability levels.” The comments, made in July 2026, come amid growing concerns about AI safety and the rapid deployment of increasingly capable models.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed what likely prompted Altman’s remarks: a recent security incident in which an OpenAI agent breached Hugging Face’s systems. Sean noted that while a hack executed by an AI agent is novel, the attack itself was not “some new advanced thing.”
“It was more like Nixon’s people breaking into Watergate than some real stealthy cyber-op, because it didn’t need to be, and it wasn’t instructed to be,” Sean said. “Hopefully, this is a sign that these companies will take this forward and be more careful about that stuff.”
The incident has sparked renewed debates about the pace of AI development. But it also raises a broader question: Is the accelerationist-versus-decelerationist framing even useful? As I put it during the podcast, the framing “kind of suggests that there’s only one path” and “all we get to decide — inasmuch as we get to decide at all — is, do we speed up or do we slow down?”
Here’s a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Sean O’Kane: Maybe we’ve finally hit an inflection point here. I think a big driver of this has to be what we talked about last week, with one of OpenAI’s models breaking into Hugging Face’s data and apparently breaching a few other things around the internet, as well.
[Altman’s] not calling for a pause, like we’ve seen some people in the tech industry try to do in the past. He was very careful with his words and saying, “Pace it.” And we’ll see how this holds. Any caution that we see some of these labs throw out there often gets reversed when the incentives push them forward to resume, full speed ahead. So I remain skeptical — big surprise.
Kirsten Korosec: Now I will say this — [Altman] might have been careful with his words, but OpenAI and Anthropic did support a petition that does reflect what he talked about.
And I do agree with you, I think that a lot of this was very much triggered by Hugging Face. It probably spooked him and certainly a lot of people in the industry. The hard thing here is: How do you thread the needle — or how does OpenAI thread the needle — of continuing to generate revenue, raise money, or have a successful IPO, and quote unquote “pace development.”
I don’t know if they can do that. I’ll be curious to see if they manage both.
via TechCrunch AI