🚨 Flash Sale 🚨 Get $100 off your Disrupt 2026 ticket Get $400 off your Disrupt 2026 ticket: REGISTER NOW. Close TechCrunch Desktop Logo TechCrunch Mobile Logo LatestStartupsVentureAppleSecurityAIAppsDisrupt 2026 EventsPodcastsNewsletters SearchSubmit Site Search Toggle Mega Menu Toggle Topics Latest AI Amazon Apps Biotech & Health Climate Cloud Computing Commerce Crypto Enterprise EVs Fintech Fundraising Gadgets Gaming Google Government & Policy Hardware Instagram Layoffs Media & Entertainment Meta Microsoft Privacy Robotics Security Social Space Startups TikTok Transportation Venture More from TechCrunch Staff Events Startup Battlefield StrictlyVC Newsletters Podcasts Videos Partner Content TechCrunch Brand Studio Crunchboard Contact Us Image Credits:Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto / AI Sam Altman and AI’s decel debate Anthony Ha 1:54 PM PDT · August 2, 2026 Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that it may be time to “pace the rate of AI development” so that society can “harden around some of these new capability levels.” On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed how Altman’s comments were probably prompted by a recent hack in which an OpenAI agent breached Hugging Face’s systems. Sean noted that while a hack performed by an AI agent is novel, the hack itself was not “some new advanced thing.” “It was more like Nixon’s people breaking into Watergate than some real stealthy cyber-op, because it didn’t need to be, and it wasn’t instructed to be,” Sean said.
Sean: Maybe we’ve finally hit an inflection point here. I think a big driver of this has to be what we talked about last week, with one of OpenAI’s models breaking into Hugging Face’s data and apparently breaching a few other things around the internet, as well. [Altman’s] not calling for a pause, like we’ve seen some people in the tech industry try to do in the past. He was very careful with his words and saying, “Pace it.” And we’ll see how this holds.
Any caution that we see some of these labs throw out there often gets reversed when the incentives push them forward to resume, full speed ahead. So I remain skeptical, big surprise. var playerInstance_jwplayer_6a756140b3dfd = jwplayer( "jwplayer_6a756140b3dfd" ); playerInstance_jwplayer_6a756140b3dfd.setup(); Kirsten: Now I will say this — [Altman] might have been careful with his words, but OpenAI and Anthropic did [support] a petition that does reflect what he did talk about. And I do agree with you, I think that a lot of this was very much triggered by Hugging Face.
It probably spooked him and certainly a lot of people in the industry. The hard thing here is: How do you thread the needle or how does OpenAI thread the needle of continuing to generate revenue, raise money, or have a successful IPO, and quote unquote “pace development.” I don’t know if they can do that. I’ll be curious to see if they manage both.
Anthony: One of the things I’ve been wrestling with is also this question of: Is acceleration [versus] deceleration the right framework to be thinking about this? Because it kind of suggests that there’s only one path and we’re all stuck on this path. All we get to decide — inasmuch as we get to decide at all — is, do we speed up or do we slow down?
As opposed to — again, I’m going to really torture this metaphor — but do we build different guardrails? Do we choose different paths? I’m just very resistant to this framework.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
