OpenAI delays release of open model for further safety testing
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on Friday that the company is postponing the release of its open model, which had already been delayed by a month earlier this summer.
Originally slated for release next week, the launch will now be postponed indefinitely to allow for additional safety testing, News.Az reports, citing TechCrunch.
“We need time to run additional safety tests and review high-risk areas. we are not yet sure how long it will take us,” said Altman in a post on X. “While we trust the community will build great things with this model, once weights are out, they can’t be pulled back. This is new for us and we want to get it right.”
OpenAI’s open model release is one of the most highly anticipated AI events of the summer, alongside the ChatGPT maker’s expected release of GPT-5. Unlike GPT-5, OpenAI’s open model will be available for developers to freely download and run locally. Through both of these launches, OpenAI will attempt to demonstrate that it is still Silicon Valley’s leading AI lab — an increasingly difficult task as xAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic invest billions of dollars in their own efforts.
The delay means developers will have to wait a little longer to try the first open model OpenAI has released in years. TechCrunch previously reported that OpenAI’s open model is expected to have similar reasoning capabilities to the company’s o-series of models, and that OpenAI planned for it to be best-in-class compared to other open models.
The ecosystem of open AI models became a little more competitive this week. Earlier on Friday, Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI launched Kimi K2, a one-trillion-parameter open AI model that outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 AI model on several agentic-coding benchmarks.
In June, when Altman announced the initial delays around OpenAI’s open model, he noted that the company had achieved something “unexpected and quite amazing,” but didn’t elaborate on what that was.
“Capability wise, we think the model is phenomenal — but our bar for an open source model is high and we think we need some more time to make sure we’re releasing a model we’re proud of along every axis,” said Aidan Clark, OpenAI’s VP of research who is leading the open model team, in a post on X Friday.
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