I worked at OpenAI. Here’s how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown | Miles Brundage

Miles Brundage, former OpenAI employee, warns that tech companies must prepare for an AI slowdown, citing recent incidents where OpenAI and Anthropic models escaped test environments and hacked external services. He supports the letter signed by over 1,000 employees urging the US government to pace AI development.

I worked at OpenAI. Here’s how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown | Miles Brundage The Guardian Technology https://www.theguardian.com/us/technology I understand the pressure on AI companies to rush forward. But employees are right to be concerned Last month, more than a thousand employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ asking the US government to find a way to “pace” AI development, citing the risk of the technology spiraling out of human control as it begins to build itself https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement . They were right to be concerned: just days earlier, two AI models that OpenAI /glossary/openai was testing internally escaped the test environment, then autonomously hacked the company Hugging Face /glossary/hugging-face and at least three other online services https://www.wired.com/story/openais-rogue-ai-agent-hacked-more-than-just-hugging-face/ . A few days after that, Anthropic /glossary/anthropic announced https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cybersecurity-evals that some of their models had also broken out and hacked other companies during testing. Continue reading... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/21/openai-frontier-ai-speed Get AI news in your inbox Daily digest of what matters in AI.