OpenAI used to test its AI models for months – now it's days. Why that matters

On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI has dramatically minimized its safety testing timeline.

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Eight people who are either staff at the company or third-party testers told FT that they had “just days” to complete evaluations on new models — a process they say they would normally be given “several months” for.

Competitive edge

Evaluations are what can surface model risks and other harms, such as whether a user could jailbreak a model to provide instructions for creating a bioweapon. For comparison, sources told FT that OpenAI gave them six months to review GPT-4 before it was released — and that they only found concerning capabilities after two months.

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Sources added that OpenAI’s tests are not as thorough as they used to be and lack the necessary time and resources to properly catch and mitigate risks. “We had more thorough safety testing when [the technology] was less important,” one person, who is currently testing o3, the full version of o3-mini, told FT. They also described the shift as “reckless” and “a recipe for disaster.”

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The sources attributed the rush to OpenAI’s desire to maintain a competitive edge, especially as open-weight models from competitors, like Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, gain more ground. OpenAI is rumored to be releasing o3 next week, which FT’s sources say rushed the timeline to under a week.

No regulation

The shift emphasizes the fact that there is still no government regulation for AI models, including any requirements to disclose model harms. Companies including OpenAI signed voluntary agreements with the Biden administration to conduct routine testing with the US AI Safety Institute, but records of those agreements have quietly fallen away as the Trump administration has reversed or dismantled all Biden-era AI infrastructure.

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However, during the open comment period for the Trump administration’s forthcoming AI Action Plan, OpenAI advocated for a similar arrangement to avoid navigating patchwork state-by-state legislation.

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Outside the US, the EU AI Act will require that companies risk test their models and document results.

“We have a good balance of how fast we move and how thorough we are,” Johannes Heidecke, head of safety systems at OpenAI, told FT. Testers themselves seemed alarmed, though, especially considering other holes in the process, including evaluating the less-advanced versions of the models that are then released to the public or referencing an earlier model’s capabilities rather than testing the new one itself.

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