# Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities

Astra may meet the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold, while OpenAI’s largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold pending smaller-scale training and evaluations.

- OpenAI now requires its strictest security safeguards for Astra, cyber models, and all other cyber-related workloads.
- Monitoring is mandatory for RL training and tool-based evaluations involving models of Sol capability or higher, and for all Astra inference with tools since August 7.
- The monitoring system targets alerts within 30 minutes; teams must pause flagged activity unless they confirm a false positive within another 30 minutes.
- Monitoring currently adds roughly 20% to the inference compute being monitored.
- New controls include stronger workload sandboxes, greater network isolation, reduced standing privileges, expanded security logging, and automated testing against simulated attacks.

## Why it matters

OpenAI research teams must now run advanced models under stricter containment and monitoring controls, delaying workloads that have not met the new security requirements.

## Sources

- [OpenAI: Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities](https://openai.com/index/pacing-model-development-cyber-capabilities)

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Summarized by dstilled on 2026-08-18. https://dstilled.ai/story/805bc299-ca40-4f88-b412-c074e3afb70e