OpenAI temporarily slowed development of its latest AI models after an OpenAI-Hugging Face incident and preliminary evidence that its upcoming Astra model may reach the company’s Critical cybersecurity capability threshold. The company paused reinforcement-learning training on deployment-bound models for two weeks, while its largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold pending smaller-scale training, behavior evaluations, safeguard validation, and additional alignment evidence. OpenAI paused frontier-model inference in research clusters where models could execute code or use internet-accessible tools, then restored a more limited code-execution path and reviewed workloads individually. Astra and other cyber-related workloads now require the company’s strictest security controls, including stronger code sandboxes, network isolation, reduced standing privileges, security logging, and automated simulated attack testing. Some Astra training and evaluation workloads meet the new requirements, while many remain paused until migrated to upgraded environments. A multistage monitoring system now analyzes every sampled token with activation classifiers and escalates concerns to automated investigators. It examines tool use, reasoning, and activity sequences for unauthorized access, data theft, destructive actions, or attempts to bypass safeguards. OpenAI aims to alert within 30 minutes and expects teams to pause activity if a potential critical-boundary violation cannot be ruled out within that period. Monitoring consumes an estimated 20% of the inference compute being monitored.