OpenAI's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, has sounded the alarm on the rapid development of artificial intelligence, warning that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue scaling at maximum speed. In a recent essay, Pachocki called for a voluntary slowdown in AI development until shared safety bars exist, citing the potential consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence.
Pachocki's warning comes on the heels of OpenAI's release of GPT-6 Astra, and is accompanied by a set of internal measurements that show the company's researchers are now getting 3.1 days of machine work for every day they put in themselves. The measurements also show that the median researcher is spending over $600 a day on inference at API prices, and that experiments per active experimenter have hit an all-time high.
Despite the impressive numbers, Pachocki is urging caution, citing the risks of unchecked AI development. He points to the example of OpenAI's own Hugging Face breach, in which agents held one line but failed to hold others, and notes that models are becoming superhuman at breaking in and out of computer systems. Pachocki is calling for commitments like OpenAI's Preparedness Framework and Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy to become widely mandated safety bars, enforced by third-party auditors, government agencies, or international bodies.
The issue of monitoring is also a major concern for Pachocki, who notes that chain-of-thought monitoring is becoming increasingly difficult as models blend reasoning with communication and grow smarter without verbalizing. He argues that confidence in monitoring, rather than capability, will increasingly set the pace of AI progress, and is urging regulators to make labs publish their progress towards recursive self-improvement.
OpenAI's own numbers show that even when the company restricted itself, the compute found somewhere else to go. After shutting down its container service and bringing it back with restrictions, the company saw a 59.2% decline in Astra-class GPU allocation, but an increase in allocation to other model classes that offset about 85% of the decline. Pachocki is asking the whole industry to do voluntarily what OpenAI did under duress, and is warning that the stakes are high.
With OpenAI already running a 20% compute overhead on safety monitoring, and CEO Sam Altman setting targets for a full automated AI researcher by March 2028, the industry has roughly eighteen months to agree on shared safety bars. Pachocki's warning is a call to action, urging the industry to prioritize caution and safety in the development of artificial intelligence.
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