❯ OpenAI’s chief scientist says no lab has solved alignment enough to keep scaling at full speed, hopes voluntary slowdowns become commonplace

the sentenceOpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki wrote something unusual on the company blog on September 5: “Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.” He calls for voluntary slowdowns until shared safety bars exist, and says OpenAI may unilaterally withhold further scaling when needed. Sam Altman reposted it with one line: “An important post from Jakub.”

the other halfThe same post is also about acceleration. By the company’s own measurement, Pachocki says OpenAI has hit the goal announced last fall — an automated research intern by September of this year, meaning a human-supervised system that completes well-defined tasks a skilled researcher would need days for. Next is a full automated AI researcher by March 2028. He adds that internal results give him a strong expectation this pace can be sustained into recursive self-improvement.

internal numbersThe post also puts figures on internal R&D acceleration for the first time: OpenAI engineers change roughly 7x more code per contributor than the pre-2025 baseline. A second set on “time horizon” shows the boundary more clearly — 86% success without human intervention on sub-15-minute tasks, collapsing as tasks lengthen. Research has shifted from individuals using an assistant to researchers supervising several parallel agents. Simon Willison noticed a sharp jump in token spend in mid-July and suspects that is when Astra reached employees.

two curvesA call to slow down and an expectation of recursive self-improvement in the same post is not a contradiction. It is an attempt to get safety standards written before the capability curve arrives. The problem is that “voluntary” has no enforcement: a lab that stops alone simply hands the lead to one that does not. The concrete variable to watch is whether OpenAI actually pauses once before that March 2028 date, and whether a second lab makes the same commitment.

▪ SIGNALSaying nobody has solved alignment while dating an automated researcher to March 2028 — the distance between those two sentences is the industry’s exposure.