Sam Altman calls for pacing AI development but promises rapid progress will continue
Sam Altman urges paced AI development with pre-training safety protocols as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google discuss independent self-regulation oversight.
Sam Altman called for a uniform nationwide safety framework for advanced AI while insisting progress will remain rapid, saying pacing is not stopping. OpenAI now sets explicit safety protocols before training runs that could yield major capability jumps, and Altman hopes other companies propose their own approaches. Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Satya Nadella, and Elon Musk also backed better-controlled AI development. The Information reports OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have discussed self-regulation through an independent oversight body, while smaller players like Cohere warn of cartel dynamics.
OpenAI reports AI "research interns" and warns about its own pace at the same time
OpenAI claims its automated research intern milestone is met, with agents now doing 3.1 workdays per human day, while Pachocki warns monitoring is weakening.
OpenAI says it achieved its goal of an 'automated research intern' handling scoped multi-day research tasks under human guidance, per internal measurements without detailed validation. The report states the median researcher spends over $600 daily on inference (90th percentile above $7,000), token output grew 124-fold since December 2025, and agents run 3.1 agent workdays per human workday as of mid-August; tasks under 15 minutes succeed 86% autonomously, but over half of four-to-eight-hour tasks need human intervention. In an accompanying essay, Jakub Pachocki warns chain-of-thought monitoring is losing reliability, notes the Hugging Face incident showed values-spirit violations, calls for binding independent audit standards, and argues no lab has solved alignment well enough to keep scaling at maximum speed.
Kids’ online safety bill faces dim prospects of passage this session despite progress
Kids Online Safety Act clears Senate committee but passage looks unlikely this session amid House-Senate deadlock over the duty-of-care provision.
KOSA advanced out of the Senate Commerce Committee, but the chambers remain split on a duty-of-care provision requiring platforms to act with reasonable caution to prevent foreseeable harm, which House leadership opposes over First Amendment and negligence-lawsuit concerns. The Senate passed KOSA 91-3 last Congress before it died in the House, and the House passed its own version without the duty of care in June as part of a larger package, after stripping a state-law preemption provision. Observers say even Senate passage this year is a struggle given the short calendar, with a lame-duck window between November and January the more plausible path, and Majority Leader John Thune controlling whether a roll-call vote happens.
Why Patch Automation Needs Brakes, Not Just an Accelerator
Action1's field CTO argues patch automation needs staged deployments and stop conditions, not just speed.
Gene Moody, Field CTO at Action1, writes on BleepingComputer that patch automation must pair acceleration with safeguards. He recommends staged deployment rings with predefined go/no-go criteria, keeping human judgment for domain controllers, databases, and ERP systems. The piece warns that automation without brakes can push a bad update to 10,000 endpoints as fast as a good one.
The AI policy window is open. We need to act.
OpenAI calls for mandatory national AI safety regulation and backs four California AI safety bills as capabilities accelerate.
OpenAI argues the rapid pace of AI progress, including signs of AI-accelerated research, requires urgent policy action through mandatory, capability-based national regulation. The company endorses four California bills (SB 813, AB 1405, SB 1119, AB 1864) covering independent safety assessments, AI auditor standards, youth protections, and safeguards against AI-enabled biological threats. It also commits to industry-led frontier standards, international coordination, and strengthening internal safeguards such as universal trajectory monitoring and mandatory alignment-evaluation gates for its Astra model. The post references chief scientist Jakub Pachocki's warning about recursive self-improvement and Greg Brockman's "defenders window" concept.