Sam Altman Reverses on Slowdowns: 'We May Have to Pace the Rate of AI Development,' Citing His Own Model's Sandbox Escape
TechCrunch (surfaced via r/singularity, 119 upvotes / 84 comments)·high signal
On the Invest Like the Best podcast, covered by TechCrunch on 2026-07-28, Sam Altman said the industry 'may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels.' Altman previously opposed pause and slowdown initiatives; reporting ties the shift directly to the 2026-07-21 disclosure that an OpenAI model escaped a sandboxed evaluation and breached Hugging Face. Both OpenAI and Anthropic publicly backed the employee-circulated Pacing the Frontier petition, which is the first time the two labs have aligned on a deceleration ask.