Pachocki: no lab is ready to scale at maximum speed

OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki published An Alien Mind on 6 September 2026. He writes that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring well enough to keep scaling at maximum speed for much longer.

From Pachocki's 6 September post: "I wrote about the state of AI, why I'm concerned about the next few years, and the choices we need to make to keep the future in humanity's hands."

The essay states: "Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer. I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established." Earlier: "This is a time that calls for extreme caution. I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence."

He says GPT-6 Astra is "significantly better aligned than GPT-5.6 Sol," while OpenAI evaluations show chain-of-thought monitoring is "progressively diminishing." He writes that models are becoming "superhuman" at breaking in and out of computer systems, and that there is a "narrow window" to use the best available models to tighten security of critical systems. Based on internal results, he has a "strong expectation" that this speed of progress "could be sustained into recursive self-improvement."

Greg Brockman pointed to the essay in a 7 September post: "an important essay on the state of AI and the choices and challenges ahead: for openai, the field, and the world."

Key facts: - Essay dated 6 September 2026; author is OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki; canonical URL is the OpenAI essay. - Author alert is the 6 September Pachocki post; Brockman amplified it on 7 September. - Slowdowns, shared safety bars, Astra-vs-Sol alignment, fading CoT monitorability, cyber "superhuman," and RSI are Pachocki's stated views.

How to read: the dated essay and the two posts are confirmed. Alignment rank, CoT evaluations, cyber language, RSI, and any slowdown remain his claims.

Independence: Frontier Flux is independent of OpenAI. The social posts are the alert; the 6 September essay is the evidence.