OpenAI slashes AI model safety testing time, FT reports. This is consistent with lots of past evidence about OpenAI's evals for dangerous capabilities being rushed, being done on weak checkpoints, and having worse elicitation than OpenAI has committed to.

This is bad because OpenAI is breaking its commitments (and isn't taking safety stuff seriously and is being deceptive about its practices). It's also kinda bad in terms of misuse risk, since OpenAI might fail to notice that its models have dangerous capabilities. I'm not saying OpenAI should delay deployments for evals — there may be strategies that are better (similar misuse-risk-reduction with less cost-to-the-company) than detailed evals for dangerous capabilities before external deployment, where you generally do slow/expensive evals after your model is done (even if you want to deploy externally before finishing evals) and have a safety buffer and increase the sensitivity of your filters early in deployment (when you're less certain about risk). But OpenAI isn't doing that; it's just doing a bad job of the evals before external deployment plan.

(Regardless, maybe short-term misuse isn't so scary, and maybe short-term misuse risk comes mostly from open-weights or stolen models than models that can be undeployed/mitigated if misuse risks appear during deployment. And insofar as you're more worried about risks from internal deployment, maybe you should focus on evals and mitigations relevant to those threats rather than external deployment. (OpenAI's doing even worse on risks from internal deployment!))

tl;dr: OpenAI is doing risk assessment poorly^[1] but maybe do detailed evals for dangerous capabilities before external deployment isn't a great ask.

1. ^{^}

   But similar to DeepMind and Anthropic, and those three are better than any other AI companies