OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said the company is working to make its increasingly powerful AI models broadly available while strengthening safeguards around their capabilities. (Image: Reuters)OpenAI said on Friday it cannot rule out that its upcoming AI model, Astra, has “critical” cybersecurity capabilities, prompting the startup to pause some internal development and trigger safety protocols. Under OpenAI’s safety guidelines, a model reaches the “critical” threshold if it can autonomously identify and exploit severe, real-world software vulnerabilities, known as zero-day exploits, or execute complex cyberattacks against ⁠highly ​secure targets without human intervention. This follows an exclusive report by Reuters that OpenAI has discovered more instances in which autonomous agents have escaped containment as the company expands its ​investigation ​of the hacking incident at tech firm ⁠Hugging Face that drew global attention in July.