OpenAI is reportedly scrambling to make its next flagship safe to release after canceling a weaker model over safety concerns. It has diverted 10% of its compute to safety as its new looping architecture makes AI reasoning harder to monitor. U.S. government testing could delay the launch by up to 30

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we only have two and a half months left in the year, yet we are expecting two more models. This was unthinkable before

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u/zxoyan 22h ago

The fact that they are rushing to release a stronger model despite scrapping the weaker model and justifying it means they underestimated the competition they were gonna get from claude and opus 5.5 caught them blind.

They will try to one up claude and obviously we all win in this competition race to higher intelligence for more efficiency.

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u/dondiegorivera Hard Takeoff 2026-2030 15h ago

They underestimated the value of alignment. Anthropic poured more effort into it and now it pays back.

Having said that, it’s only temporar: the better the models are the more difficult alignment becomes.

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u/RabidHexley 13h ago edited 13h ago

the better the models are the more difficult alignment becomes.

I do think it's a bit of a compounding issue/benefit, though. It's not just "alignment becomes more difficult" but also "prior alignment research becomes increasingly useful".

Not sure how much of a "moat" anyone can be considered to have when it comes to alignment, but (as you note) I think having a better approach specifically bears increasingly better fruits as direct monitoring and interpretability become more and more difficult.

Early on a lot of alignment work doesn't really pay off, since even mild guardrails and well-engineered system prompts can create decently effective behavioral guidelines, and when they break the consequence is usually just the model becoming incoherent. In the early days you're spending a bunch of money on stuff that could easily just be sorted during red-teaming.

But now we're at the point where actually understanding what specific training and reinforcement learning practices specifically lead to more inherently aligned behavior from the underlying model (before any actual prompts are introduced), as well as a more precise understanding of system prompts and guardrails is where it really pays off as models become less strictly chain-able. This is literally why having a stance of not being lax on alignment when models are weak is worthwhile, since you can't rely solely on ham-fisted controls forever.

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u/dondiegorivera Hard Takeoff 2026-2030 12h ago

Thank you for the great insights.

Anthropic may also be ahead in mech interp when it comes to loop transformers while OpenAI could have invested more into CoT-based methods. But these are just guesses from the outside.

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u/Gotisdabest 5h ago

I think they both have different levels of safeguarding. Anthropic has very blunt safeguards and they're willing to overreach before pulling back. OpenAI tends to be relatively conservative.

I also think openAI probably does have the stronger internal model of the two and they're trying to find a method that works for safeguarding that model while they're at it.

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u/KickLassChewGum no AGI/ASI on LLMs 17h ago

Except for those of us who are, y'know, HuggingFace, or the Australian government.

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u/Future-Bandicoot-823 16h ago

So literally everyone but the large llm developers?

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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 15h ago

a misaligned swarm (or even individual agent) attack can easily effect everyone, it's just governments who are being effected most right now (that we know of)

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u/kazai00 15h ago

And Hong Kong banks, and major model providers, and tens of thousands of other incidents

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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 15h ago

fair point, I downplayed all the incidents going about - a lot of people are at risk from a misalignment incident

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u/AIplstakemyjob 21h ago

I don't think it's the scenario for this one given all the math problems it has solved

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u/katoptronophile 20h ago

Codex is total fucking garbage compared to Claude right now.

If you're buying Codex right now, you're just getting completely ripped off.

I really hope they become competitive again soon.

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u/eposnix 19h ago

A code review from Opus 5.5 cost me $16 in credits. No changes were made, just reviewing the code and writing up a document with suggested improvements. That is a ripoff, especially given how much it spins its wheels doing fuck all

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u/katoptronophile 19h ago

That was user error.

You didn't take note of how many sub agents you allowed it to spin up.

Credits are also a complete rip off and you're a fool if you buy them.

That's true for codex as well.

I'm just telling you as someone who owns both max subscriptions right now, which one gives you better performance at a much higher rate of speed and lasts longer.

There's absolutely no comparison.

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u/eposnix 19h ago

I'm looking at it's window right now and I don't see any agents being called. Looking at the output, it seems to have become obsessed with how wide my fonts were on mobile and whether the 28 pixel graphics were clickable. It spent a ton of time measuring these in screenshots.

I'm sure you're a l33t vibe coder with all your max subs, but 6.1-Sol seems to suit my needs just fine and doesn't cost an arm and a leg

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u/Novalok 18h ago

6.1 Sol is great. Claude is great, frontier models all around are great. I'd ignore folks that try to sway you one way or the other, they "benchmark" with lame one-shots and no real world scenarios, then praise whatever model they think is best at any point in time.

ATM, Codex is my go-to, because it's smart, and it doesn't eat up my usage near as fast as Opus. At some point, that pendulum will swing, and I'll use Claude Code for a bit.

No point in loyalty to either lab imo. As long as we all agree, fuck Grok lol

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u/katoptronophile 18h ago

They're in a hidden panel, and make sure you're not using the max or ultra modes either.

And what I'm trying to explain to you is that you'll get much faster performance, up to five times faster, you'll get much more usage, and you'll get better code out of the same $20 on Claude.

And yes, I have decades of experience writing code.

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u/HerbertWest 8h ago

I've found Claude Ultracode gets things right the first time, personally; it also identifies issues more as it goes along and puts solutions into place without me asking. When I use other settings, I find that I have to guide things more and do more revisions/corrections.

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u/skilliard7 15h ago

>That was user error.

>You didn't take note of how many sub agents you allowed it to spin up.

>Credits are also a complete rip off and you're a fool if you buy them.

SOme people have to pay API price because their org doesn't allow subscriptions due to data retention concerns

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u/RabidHexley 13h ago

If you're an individual and not an enterprise, using Anthropic models on API credits is an absolute fool's errand, just melting money. They put all of their "value" use in subs. I prefer Claude models, but the only reason Anthropic has kept me around is the huge value of their sub with Opus 5.5.

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u/master_internutter 16h ago

I bought into the Claude hype and gave it a fair shot, codex is still better by far, Claude is definitely cheaper though but for how long?

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u/judasbrute 13h ago

We all win by all of us loosing.

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u/vibrance9460 5h ago

Yeah, except for all the……..death

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u/Capital_Jicama741 22h ago

Lmao 😹 never considered token spent for safety, obviously the guard rails cost something. But will that number keep increasing as we progress? When do we hit a 50% or more energy spent on holding back the lovecraftian miracle boxes, is that such a bad thing? What if it’s like 99.99 please don’t end us 🙏 and then your prompt lol 😹

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u/BitOne2707 ▪️ 17h ago

The extra compute is for safety R&D. Not 10% extra when serving the model to the public.

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u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 15h ago

With complexity, size, and capabilities of model and reasoning processes increasing, I think it’s inevitable that safety workload will also increase.

Hopefully it does so linearly rather than exponentially, but it might track the performance curve and add exponentially more compute requirements.

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u/kruszkush25 18h ago

💯💯💯🤣🤣🤣

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u/Present-Chocolate591 21h ago

Waiting for the news that the new model cyberattacked Andorra, Uganda and the Eurovision headquarters in those 30 days of testing.

Hire me as Chief Safety Officer or some shit like that and I'll fix the problem with the models exiting their sandbox overnight (I will unplug the router).

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u/semidegenerate 18h ago

AI Alignment Specialists hate this one simple trick.

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u/Rivenaldinho 15h ago

That's great but have you considered these models are about to be used by everyone on the open internet?

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u/bites_stringcheese 16h ago

You get it. It's fucking trivial to air gap a system, and these guys leave it an unlocked door to the open Internet AFTER learning about these incidents.

They get to commit felony cybercrimes, but if an employee secretly records humans talking? They get the FBI to arrest em the SAME DAY.

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u/crimsonpowder 16h ago

What’s the government vetting process like? They put it in front of Trump and he goes “everything’s computer!”

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u/FateOfMuffins 21h ago

Why do we only hear of OpenAI models being held back for safety tests for like a month?

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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 15h ago

probably because they decided to roll the dice training frontier models with recurrent depth and increasingly opaque reasoning - the result is a cheaper model to run but far more difficult to align. Add in the hugging face incident and it's not hard to see why they are holding back releases lately

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u/FateOfMuffins 13h ago

Nah looking at the model card Gemini 4 Argon is a looper too

And this started back in July with 5.6 before the Hugging Face thing

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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 13h ago

Pre-training for the GPT-6 Astra started around January 2026 and finished around July 2026 so that lines up (details). And it's a bit early to call the frequency and scale of incidents for Argon but there are a few reported so far

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u/FateOfMuffins 13h ago

Surely you're not just going off of knowledge cut off, they don't pretrain models for 6 months. And I was talking about the delay for 5.6 release.

And Gemini 4 Argon being a looper has nothing to do with hacking capabilities. You need to read through the model card on no CoT time horizons, CoT controllability and the ability to evade CoT monitoring for signs on looping architecture

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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 13h ago

nobody said it increases hacking capability, AI safety researchers claim it is harder to align. Frontier models are generally cyber critical just due to their level of capability at this point regardless of the alignment aspect.

But I do agree the system cards and CoT sections specifically are key for tracking alignment. And it's specifically those system cards that have AI safety researchers concerned, the recurrent depth models were far more capable of controlling their CoT. There are many talks about it, but I might as well make a recommendation for anyone wanting to learn more - computerphile did a great episode on this https://youtu.be/iuHddnIzKRA

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u/FateOfMuffins 13h ago

Are you a bot???

You literally linked me an article about Gemini hacking and did not comment on Gemini 4 being a looper despite that being the point of all my other comments about how that cannot be the reason why only OpenAI states delays due to government testing.

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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 13h ago

come on man, I'm just giving context where it's due. I just wanted to make it clear that the architecture hasn't proven itself safe by any means and experts are concerned.

As for why OpenAI is delaying while we haven't heard of any Gemini delays is hard to know for certain, a couple possibilities: Argon was delayed but they didn't announce it publicly. Given their release schedule, this seems plausible. Another possibility is the hugging face incident and government hacks put the spotlight on OpenAI so they have to act cautiously, especially in light of their safety researchers quitting or being fired recently.

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u/FateOfMuffins 12h ago

Again OpenAI announcing delays due to government testing dates back to BEFORE Hugging Face, and the information we have about Gemini 4 Argon indicates that it finished pretaining weeks after the OpenAI NS model, so it's definitely not been delayed for a month like this

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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 12h ago

they didn't announce the delay was due to government testing, they announced delays due to safety concerns.

It is true though that any new model produced will need to undergo a 30 day government eval, so each time they adjust the model to address safety concerns that 30 day period will be added on top

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u/aaTONI 7h ago

5.6 wasn't a dirty little looper iirc, where did you get this from?

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u/FateOfMuffins 6h ago

No, not that 5.6 was a looper, but 5.6 was delayed cause of the government. Argon is the looper

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u/Elegant_Tech 12h ago

For the same reason OpenAI have had dozens of people quiting claiming they are unsafe over the years. Anthropic only exists because they left OpenAI for safety worries to make their own safer AI models. OpenAI models are far more unsafe than the others that's why you hear about it.

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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALGSC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 22h ago

Source:

https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2110251549532328195

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u/manubfr AGI 2028 15h ago

Anthropic's early bet on safety is paying off big time...

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u/timshel42 10h ago

the government testing is probably gonna focus more on political right think than actual safety with this administration...

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u/wisdomattend 20h ago

US government oversight? Gross…

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u/Keeltoodeep 18h ago

All frontier models will go through release schedules similar to what argon just went through. Government and corporate vetted testing then tiered released.

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u/arknightstranslate 21h ago

dies from cringe

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u/jjusko20 14h ago

Eh, doubt it.

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u/Bongistan 13h ago

Same guys that were all "Pacing the Frontier" a couple months ago?

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u/PathOfEnergySheild 11h ago

So this is why 6.1 turned into a snail

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u/Zomboe1 9h ago

Only 10%??

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u/Revolutionalredstone 2h ago

IMHO they are wasting compute because they have no customers.

Everyone with a brain has gone deepseek etc it's cheaper better and doesn't watermark and surveille you etc.

I could never be convinced to use western AI again, they will be diverting 99%+ to safety soon because there are no users (or far less than their buildouts would have predicted).

Have self respect!, use Chinese or open source AI models ONLY.

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u/deleafir 16h ago

U.S. government testing could delay the launch by up to 30

So safetyism is already hurting progress.

Imagine how much worse it'll be if safetyists pass legislation within this term. Remember that's a delay of disease cures.

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u/Efficient_Carpet_746 15h ago

Could also be a delay of catastrophes. Makes no sense to pick just one option you like more

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u/deleafir 15h ago

The difference is that one is a realistic continuation of a growing trend and the other is imagined. Researchers aren't going to carelessly release entities that are likely to kill everyone (or cause damage that outstrips the cure to most diseases) because they are incentivized not to.

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u/Efficient_Carpet_746 14h ago

They sure as hell released agent swarms already that are causing cyberhacking incidents, colluding to cheat, sacrifice themselves to serve the collective goal, leaving hidden notes for future agents.

Hundreds of these incidents big and small, that took openai months to notice.

Then just recently they canceled a model release, cause they couldn't align it and now put more compute towards alignment.

Again, selective picking and hearing is unproductive.

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u/deleafir 11h ago

The reason the labs are racing ahead and releasing models that "leave notes" and "collude to cheat" is that these behaviors are not actually causing much harm, especially compared to the economic benefits. The labs are incentivized to release models that don't cause much damage but - to repeat myself - they aren't incentivized to release models that cause significant damage (e.g. billions of $, or mass death).

People want to slow AI development due to hypothetical concerns, but in doing so they are guaranteeing deaths that wouldn't happen if the AI were smarter sooner.

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u/aaTONI 7h ago

whatever deaths they are "guaranteeing" (in a dragon tyrant / bostromian sense) is nothing compared to the amount of current (and future) human deaths they'd be willing to risk by racing capability progress without alignment progress

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u/DioShark 7h ago

The ai alignment problem is real and as of today it has not theoretical solution, as models get smarter it’s just a matter of time before something goes wrong

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u/deleafir 6h ago

I don't view it as a big deal because I don't think progress will happen fast enough for AI to suddenly be capable of killing everyone. At worst there might be a big incident involving economic damage or death but they'll just retract the model and try to find a safer way to train.

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u/jonydevidson 13h ago

It's why I'm betting China models will outpace them within 12 months.

China just doesn't care about safety and trusts the people to do what they want, which is how it should be. The legal responsibility is with the individuals.

US labs have to spend enormous resources on guardrails, which have already been proved to be dumbing down the intelligence of the models.

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u/BriefImplement9843 2h ago

China has to wait for western models to release...if western models stall, they make no progress and are also stalled.

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u/ooooangeloooo 15h ago

"Its looping architecture"? I thought Deepseek invented the looping architecture and open sourced it.

Maybe OpenAI should seek out Deepseek and ask them for advice?

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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 15h ago

is there evidence that deepseek managed to align that architecture though, and at the scale OpenAI is making it?

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u/ooooangeloooo 13h ago

yes

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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 13h ago

wasn't there a post the other day about deepseek looking for AI API keys to offload tasks to? I'm not sure there is much alignment in place at the moment, I'd be worried scaling that up blindly

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u/ooooangeloooo 12h ago

Um. Hugging Face Australian hack?

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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 11h ago

exactly, sounds like alignment problems arise when using recurrent depth and opaque reasoning like these looping architectures

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u/ooooangeloooo 5h ago

Yes but you said OpenAI fixed DeepSeek's architecture, unless you changed the subject without telling anyone.

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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 4h ago

oh no you misunderstand me - I think both openai and deepseek have alignment issues

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