🔬 If AI starts doing more and more of its own research, can we actually keep monitoring the systems it builds? OpenAI's honest answer right now is: not yet. "Recursive self-improvement" (RSI) — AI systems increasingly conducting the research needed to build the next generation of AI — hasn't reached full autonomy today. But OpenAI warns that without enough care, this process could leave people unable to oversee systems they no longer understand. That's why they state plainly it shouldn't be pursued until it can be done safely. The core problem is that different countries and labs are each evaluating risk by their own separate yardsticks, making comparison or verification nearly impossible. So OpenAI proposes US-led international technical standards, coordinating national AI safety institutes across Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, Kenya, Singapore, South Korea, and the UK through the US "AI Standards and Innovation Center" — aiming for shared measures covering self-improvement progress, the volume of autonomous research, thresholds requiring human review, and how incidents get classified. Crucially, they note that standards alone aren't enough — they only matter once they're actually tied to governance decisions like delaying a release or granting conditional access. Building standards for the next phase of AI What stands out is the framing that aligning the "measuring stick" internationally may be more urgent right now than the technology itself. #AISafety# #OpenAI#