OpenAI’s latest AI models have a new safeguard to prevent biorisks

OpenAI says that it deployed a new system to monitor its latest AI reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, for prompts related to biological and chemical threats. The system aims to prevent the models from offering advice that could instruct someone on carrying out potentially harmful attacks, according to OpenAI’s safety report. O3 and o4-mini represent a meaningful capability increase over OpenAI’s previous models, the company says, and thus pose new risks in the hands of bad actors. According to OpenAI’s internal benchmarks, o3 is more skilled at answering questions around creating certain types of biological threats in particular. For this reason — and to mitigate other risks — OpenAI created the new monitoring system, which the company describes as a “safety-focused reasoning monitor.” The monitor, custom-trained to reason about OpenAI’s content policies, runs on top of o3 and o4-mini. It’s designed to identify prompts related to biological and chemical risk and instruct the models to ... Read full article.