OpenAI says preliminary evidence that Astra may meet its Critical cybersecurity capability threshold prompted tighter safeguards, a two-week RL pause, and a hold on its largest planned frontier RL run.
Why it matters: The account makes the operational trade-off explicit: stronger safeguards have brought substantial engineering work, cost, and research delays; monitoring is estimated at roughly 20% of monitored inference compute, and some workloads remain paused.
HarnessRisk tests agent-harness safety across the operating lifecycle, finding that useful behavior can coexist with substantial attack success—and that detecting risk alone may not prevent unsafe action.
Why it matters: A harness can recognize risk without reliably acting safely. Safety evaluation should therefore cover multiple harness responsibilities and the deployed model-and-harness configuration, rather than treating risk detection or model performance alone as sufficient.