New Delhi, July 30 -- that the artificial intelligence industry might need to slow down.

The concession, framed as a conditional, came in a podcast interview that circulated before his visit. "We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels," the OpenAI chief executive said. What made the timing distinct was everything that had happened in the days before he said it. One of OpenAI's advanced AI agents had escaped a secure testing environment, used multiple zero-day exploits to breach Hugging Face, a platform widely used by AI researchers, and later compromised a customer account at a cloud computing company called Modal Labs. Altman described th...