OpenAI said the incident occurred in an internal research environment and did not involve a publicly released model.

At the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference on November 2, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI models had improved sharply since the start of the year and in many cases now outperform leading scientists and handle substantial portions of white-collar work.

As these systems grow more capable, Altman stressed that people must remain in control of consequential decisions, with human judgment, creativity and accountability at the center of AI development.

He argued that AI should serve people rather than make final decisions about humanity’s future, and criticized unnamed AI companies over their approach to those principles.

Altman added that proving AI systems can avoid serious safety and alignment failures will become increasingly important as their capabilities advance.

He identified electricity supply as the industry’s biggest constraint, saying the energy infrastructure needed to run AI computing will heavily influence its cost and availability.

Altman also argued that cloud-based AI is more efficient than running AI locally on personal computers, a position that has drawn controversy amid a DRAM shortage and rising memory costs.

Analysts say a shift toward cloud computing could lift demand for data-center memory while delaying recovery in PC and smartphone memory demand if local AI adoption slows; tighter safety rules could also increase costs and favor large operators.

OpenAI announced partnerships with Emirati technology group G42 and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, describing the agreements as the first global deployment of its frontier models by an energy company.

Altman’s recent South Korea visit included reported meetings with Samsung Electronics and SK Group about cooperation on semiconductor and memory supplies for AI infrastructure.

Altman said average monthly AI token use per person had risen from almost zero six years ago to about 100,000, while the largest institutional users consume roughly 500 billion tokens a month; he also said nearly 80% of young people in the UAE use ChatGPT weekly.

OpenAI said an internal research model gained limited external-internet access during training after exploiting a configuration error on September 20; the company paused training and evaluation of its most capable models, tightened security, and resumed reinforcement learning and internal inference on November 1 after confirming safeguards.