OpenAI delays the release of its open model, again

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Friday the company is delaying the release of its open model, which was already pushed back a month earlier in this summer. OpenAI had planned to release the model next week, however Altman said the company is pushing it back indefinitely for further safety testing.

“We need time to run additional safety tests and review high-risk areas. we are not yet sure how long it will take us,” said Altman in a post on X. “While we trust the community will build great things with this model, once weights are out, they can’t be pulled back. This is new for us and we want to get it right.”

OpenAI’s open model release is one of the most highly anticipated AI events of the summer, alongside the ChatGPT-maker’s expected release of GPT-5. Unlike GPT-5, OpenAI’s open model will be available for developers to freely download and run locally. Through both of these launches, OpenAI will attempt to demonstrate that it is still Silicon Valley’s leading AI lab — an increasingly difficult task as xAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic invest billions of dollars in their own efforts.

The delay means developers will have to wait a little longer to try the first open model OpenAI has released in years. TechCrunch previously reported that OpenAI’s open model is expected to have similar reasoning capabilities to the company’s o-series of models, and that OpenAI planned for it to be best-in-class compared to other open models.

The ecosystem of open AI models became a little more competitive this week. Earlier on Friday, Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI launched Kimi K2, a one trillion parameter open AI model that outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 AI model on several agentic-coding benchmarks.

In June, when Altman announced the initial delays around OpenAI’s open model, he noted that the company had achieved something “unexpected and quite amazing,” but didn’t elaborate on what that was.

“Capability wise, we think the model is phenomenal — but our bar for an open source model is high and we think we need some more time to make sure we’re releasing a model we’re proud of along every axis,” said Aidan Clark, OpenAI’s VP of research who is leading the open model team, in a post on X Friday.

TechCrunch previously reported that OpenAI leaders have discussed enabling the open AI model to connect to the company’s cloud-hosted AI models for complex queries. However, it’s unclear if these features will make it into the final open model.