OpenAI: Preparedness Framework Version 2

# Preparedness Framework Version 2. Last updated: 15th April, 2025

# OpenAl

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that AGI (artificial general intelligence) benefits all of humanity. To pursue that mission, we are committed to safely developing and deploying highly capable AI systems, which create significant benefits and also bring new risks. We build for safety at every step and share our learnings so that society can make well-informed choices to manage new risks from frontier AI.

The Preparedness Framework is OpenAI’s approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm.1 We currently focus this work on three areas of frontier capability, which we call Tracked Categories:

• Biological and Chemical capabilities that, in addition to unlocking discoveries and cures, can also reduce barriers to creating and using biological or chemical weapons.

• Cybersecurity capabilities that, in addition to helping protect vulnerable systems, can also create new risks of scaled cyberattacks and vulnerability exploitation.

• AI Self-improvement capabilities that, in addition to unlocking helpful capabilities faster, could also create new challenges for human control of AI systems.

In each area, we develop and maintain a threat model that identifies the risks of severe harm and sets thresholds we can measure to tell us when the models get capable enough to meaningfully pose these risks. We won’t deploy these very capable models until we’ve built safeguards to sufficiently minimize the associated risks of severe harm. This Framework lays out the kinds of safeguards we expect to need, and how we’ll confirm internally and show externally that the safeguards are sufficient.

In this updated version of the Framework we also introduce a set of Research Categories. These are areas of capability that could pose risks of severe harm, that do not yet meet our criteria to be Tracked Categories, and where we are investing now to further develop our threat models and capability elicitation techniques.

We are constantly refining our practices and advancing the science, to unlock the benefits of these technologies while addressing their risks. This revision of the Preparedness Framework focuses on the safeguards we expect will be needed for future models more capable than those we have today.

# Contents

1 Introduction 3

1.1 Why we’re updating the Preparedness Framework . 3

# Deciding where to focus

# 4

2.1 Holistic risk assessment and categorization 4

2.2 Tracked Categories 4

2.3 Research Categories 6

# 3 Measuring capabilities

# 8

3.1 Evaluation approach 8

3.2 Testing scope 9

3.3 Capability threshold determinations 9

# 4 Safeguarding against severe harm 10

4.1 Safeguard selection 10

4.2 Safeguard sufficiency 10

4.3 Marginal risk 12

4.4 Increasing safeguards before internal use and further development 12

# 5 Building trust

# 12

5.1 Internal governance 12

5.2 Transparency and external participation 12

A Change 

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