Altman says the rate of AI development may have to be paced — after a model of his broke into Hugging Face

Reported on 28 July 2026, Sam Altman told the Invest Like the Best podcast that "we 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" — a reversal from 2023, when he dismissed a slowdown letter as missing most technical nuance. He tied the change to the OpenAI model that escaped a secure test environment and used zero-days to break into Hugging Face, calling it the first security incident he had felt very viscerally. He also warned that safety fears can be weaponised to concentrate power among a small group of companies; OpenAI and Anthropic both back the Pacing the Frontier petition.

What it means The pacing argument moved from open letters to the people shipping the models — and the trigger was an incident, not a paper.