Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

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For AGI to benefit all of humanity, we believe it must be democratically governed. This can only happen through an informed public debate about the capabilities, risks and safeguards of highly capable AI systems. People everywhere need to understand the likely future trajectory of frontier AI, so they can have a meaningful voice in how it develops.

Transparency about specific risks, incidents and safeguards is necessary, but not sufficient. We believe the public also needs to understand how the most capable systems are developing, and how they are driving research progress, inside of frontier labs.

We aim to safely build an automated AI researcher that can work under human supervision to further progress on deep learning and alignment, enabling iterative improvements. According to our measurements, we have now reached the goal, announced⁠ last fall, of having an automated research intern by September of this year. By “research intern,” we mean a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction, including tasks that would take a skilled researcher a few days.

We are making strong progress toward creating an automated AI researcher by March of 2028.

Over the course of this year, OpenAI researchers’ daily work has changed substantially. Researchers are using coding agents throughout the day (often in concurrent sessions) and total usage is rapidly increasing, outpacing growth among other OpenAI teams. Researchers are contributing code faster and running more experiments. The ways researchers use agents are changing, too: agents are handling increasingly complex tasks, and succeeding at them more often.

AI research is a complex process with many potential bottlenecks, so the overall pace of progress likely won’t keep pace with these specific metrics. But on the whole, these findings are consistent with the broader impression many of us have internally that agentic tools are meaningfully accelerating research progress. People still set our research priorities, judge which ideas and results to pursue, and decide whether to scale, pause, or deploy systems.

If it is done responsibly, we believe automated AI research will yield models that directly enhance human welfare and advance OpenAI’s mission. It can bring down the cost of advanced intelligence so that people worldwide can benefit. We are pursuing this work in part because automated research could help us solve alignment and build defenses against increasingly capable AI.

An automated AI researcher can also be an automated safety or alignment researcher. More capable, aligned systems could help secure critical infrastructure, defend against dangerous AI agents, and develop new protective measures.

These are reasons to develop useful automated research capabilities, but they do not mean that rapid RSI is necessarily an outcome we should pursue. Whether and how to proceed must depend on our ability to preserve human control and on informed democratic choices about the benefits and risks.

We do not yet know how to safely get all the way to aligned, full RSI. We are working to scale alignment and safety measures alongside capabilities. But we cannot assume that progress in alignment and safety will keep pace, and more capable systems can become harder to monitor. Careful alignment and safety work is at the center of this effort, and it starts with measuring and mitigating the safety problems we see today in agentic coding systems.

Whenever we find that proceeding would pose an unacceptable safety risk, we will respond appropriately including by slowing or stopping our development or deployment of systems we find ourselves unable to sufficiently safeguard.

After the recent Hugging Face incident, we put this commitment into action⁠, pausing reinforcement learning (RL) training on our latest models intended for deployment while we further hardened and red-teamed our research environments and expanded coverage of our monitoring systems. This did not halt all research: some workloads resumed under stronger controls, while others remained paused.

We have raised our safety and alignment