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Investing.com -- OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research lab, has released an updated version of its Preparedness Framework, aimed at addressing potential risks associated with advanced AI capabilities. This comes after CEO Sam Altman was questioned about AI safety during a recent TED interview with Chris Anderson.
The updated framework is designed to provide a more focused approach to identifying and mitigating specific risks. It introduces stronger requirements to minimize those risks and offers clearer guidance on how the organization evaluates, governs, and discloses its safeguards. OpenAI also plans to invest heavily in making its preparedness work more actionable, rigorous, and transparent as the technology advances.
The update includes clear criteria for prioritizing high-risk capabilities, using a structured risk assessment process to evaluate whether a frontier capability could lead to severe harm. It assigns a category to each capability based on defined criteria, tracking those that meet five key criteria.
The framework also introduces sharper capability categories. Tracked Categories include Biological and Chemical capabilities, Cybersecurity capabilities, and AI Self-improvement capabilities. OpenAI believes these areas will yield some of the most transformative benefits from AI, especially in science, engineering, and research.
In addition to the Tracked Categories, the organization is introducing Research Categories. These are areas that could pose risks of severe harm but do not yet meet the criteria to be Tracked Categories. Current focus areas under this new category include Long-range Autonomy, Sandbagging (intentionally underperforming), Autonomous Replication and Adaptation, Undermining Safeguards, and Nuclear and Radiological.
The updated framework also clarifies capability levels, streamlining them to two clear thresholds: High capability and Critical capability. Both levels require safeguards to sufficiently minimize the associated risk of severe harm before deployment and during development. The Safety Advisory Group, a team of internal safety leaders, reviews these safeguards and makes recommendations to OpenAI Leadership.
The updated framework also includes scalable evaluations to support more frequent testing and defined Safeguards Reports to provide more detail about how strong safeguards are designed and their effectiveness is verified.
In the event of a shift in the frontier landscape, where another AI developer releases a high-risk system without comparable safeguards, OpenAI may adjust its requirements. However, it will first confirm that the risk landscape has changed, publicly acknowledge the adjustment, assess that the adjustment does not increase the overall risk of severe harm, and ensure safeguards remain protective.
OpenAI will continue to publish its Preparedness findings with each frontier model release, as it has done for GPT‑4o, OpenAI o1, Operator, o3‑mini, deep research, and GPT‑4.5, and share new benchmarks to support broader safety efforts across the field.
This update follows a TED interview in which CEO Sam Altman was questioned about AI safety, particularly concerning agentic AI. Altman acknowledged that the stakes are rising, describing agentic AI as the most interesting and consequential safety problem OpenAI has faced so far.
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