See Critical.
Critical The level of cyber capability, in OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework, at which a model can find and build working exploits across many well-protected systems without human help. The framework then requires safeguards during development as well as before release. Chapter 3.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
Defined in Chapter 3 — The Missing Researcher.
Sources that use it
- OpenAI, Preparedness Framework, version 2, 15 April 2025 (Critical cybersecurity threshold; safeguards required during development regardless of deployment intent; development halted until Critical-level control standards are specified and met). In the Sources
- Alex Heath, “OpenAI Is Slowing Down Its AI Training,” TIME, 18 August 2026 (Astra paused “a little more than two weeks”; largest planned frontier run on hold; Altman: “We’ve shifted a lot of compute, not just to alignment research, but also to these new monitoring systems”; possible “Critical” cyber classification under the Preparedness Framework; roughly a week to discover the breach; Anthropic’s weakened commitment recalled from TIME’s own February report, with Jared Kaplan’s “if competitors are blazing ahead” from that report; Pachocki on the lapse: “For AI, you should expect the unexpected”; Altman: “I think it is a good time to slow down”, TIME’s own scope in the same sentence being that he was “describing the company’s decision to halt the development of its most powerful, unreleased models”; TIME’s account of the lapse: OpenAI “had built monitors capable of inspecting what its models were planning, but had not applied them to the system in the evaluation because it underestimated their capabilities”). In the Sources
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Preparedness Framework.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/preparedness-framework (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-preparedness-framework-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Preparedness Framework}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/preparedness-framework},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}