OpenAI pushes back the release of its open source model indefinitely

OpenAI has announced that the release of its open source model has been shifted again, but this time indefinitely. The development was communicated to the general public by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who gave reasons for another pushback. The latest postponement comes after the first one earlier in the summer.

According to Altman, the company is pushing the release back indefinitely because it intends to carry out 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 halts release of open source model for further testing

OpenAI’s open source model release has been one of the most anticipated events of the summer, alongside the release of its GPT-5 model. Unlike GPT-5, the company’s open model will be available for free, and developers can download and run it locally. With the launches, OpenAI intends to show that it is still leading Silicon Valley when it comes to artificial intelligence.

The race for the lead in the artificial intelligence industry in Silicon Valley has taken a new shape, with companies now making moves to cement their position as the leader of the sector. The development can be seen in investments worth billions of dollars made by AI firms and labs such as Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI. While it is hard to see which company is making the best strides, all of them are making commendable moves in the sector.

The move has proven to be a success for some of these companies, with Meta’s Llama open source AI family model a typical example. The company, which has invested heavily in the models, said in March that it had recorded over one billion downloads. DeepSeek, on the other hand, has also amassed a large global user base, attracting the attention of investors.

The delay of OpenAI’s open source model means that developers will have to wait for a while to try the first open source model that the company is set to release in years. According to a report by TechCrunch, the new open source model is expected to have the same reasoning abilities as OpenAI’s o-series models, and the company has planned for it to be the best-in-class compared to the other open models.

Meanwhile, the open source AI model ecosystem became a little intense this week, with Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI launching Kimi K2, an open source AI model that it claims outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 AI model on several agentic coding benchmarks.

After Altman announced the first delay in June, he added that the company had recorded something amazing, but refused to go into details on what he meant.

“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 source model team, in a post on X.

A previous report mentioned that leaders at OpenAI have been discussing the likelihood of connecting the OpenAI mode to the company’s AI models hosted on the cloud for complex queries. However, it remains unknown if the feature will make it to the final stage.