ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has published a new set of proposals for AI: The wider industry impact

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has published a new set of proposals for AI safety standards urging international cooperation to regulate frontier artificial intelligence. The company has also stressed the need for alignment research in order to keep pace with advanced capabilities, particularly around recursive self improvement (RSI) which us a computing technique which enables the AI models to upgrade themselves without any human involvement. The company cautioned that without proper safeguards, RSI could lead to humans losing practical control over AI development.

In its blog post, OpenAI warned: “Fully autonomous RSI is not happening today, and we should not pursue it unless and until it can be done safely.

In a blog post published on September 21, OpenAI argued that navigating AI’s rapid advancement safely requires alignment research to keep pace with growing model capabilities, so the systems it and other companies build remain aligned with human values and stay under human control.

OpenAI said these technical standards should specifically target frontier AI models and their developers, along with benefit-risk management practices for automated AI researchers — a category that includes RSI. The company called for international cooperation to build shared frontier safety standards, recommending that this work build on existing AI safety institutes already operating around the world rather than starting from scratch. OpenAI was direct about where it stands on this today, stating plainly that fully autonomous RSI isn’t happening yet and shouldn’t be pursued until it can be done safely, warning that without proper care, RSI could leave humans unable to meaningfully oversee AI research processes they no longer fully understand.

Part of a broader industry reckoning

That wave gained significant momentum after Jacob Coxon, who has worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI, announced his resignation nearly two weeks ago, publicly stating that AI companies were “gambling with our lives. OpenAI’s proposals land just a week after rival Anthropic rolled out its own framework for safe frontier AI development, itself a response to a growing wave of warnings from researchers about AI’s potential risks to humanity. ” In the aftermath of recent AI-related security incidents and Coxon’s public statements, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling on AI companies to slow the pace of foundation model development, among other proposals — including embedding independent third-party evaluators directly within companies to audit and help mitigate risks like AI-accelerated cyberattacks or bioweapon development. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk both publicly backed Amodei’s proposal at the time. OpenAI’s latest move suggests the company is looking to shape what those eventual global standards look like — positioning itself at the center of a debate it helped intensify just weeks ago when it joined calls for the industry to pace itself more carefully.