OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Friday the company is delaying the release of its open model, which was already pushed back a month earlier in this summer. OpenAI had planned to release the model next week, however Altman said the company is pushing it back indefinitely for further safety testing.
“We need time to run additional safety tests and review high-risk areas. we are not yet sure how long it will take us,” said Altman in a post on X. “While we trust the community will build great things with this model, once weights are out, they can’t be pulled back. This is new for us and we want to get it right.”
OpenAI’s open model release is one of the most highly anticipated AI events of the summer, alongside the ChatGPT-maker’s expected release of GPT-5. Unlike GPT-5, OpenAI’s open model will be available for developers to freely download and run locally. Through both of these launches, OpenAI will attempt to demonstrate that it is still Silicon Valley’s leading AI lab — an increasingly difficult task as xAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic invest billions of dollars in their own efforts.
The delay means developers will have to wait a little longer to try the first open model OpenAI has released in years. TechCrunch previously reported that OpenAI’s open model is expected to have similar reasoning capabilities to the company’s o-series of models, and that OpenAI planned for it to be best-in-class compared to other open models.
The ecosystem of open AI models became a little more competitive this week. Earlier on Friday, Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI launched Kimi K2, a one trillion parameter open AI model that outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 AI model on several agentic-coding benchmarks.
In June, whe …