AI leaders sign statement asking the government to do

What happened

Employees of OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Google, Meta, Thinking Machines, Microsoft, Mistral, and other leading AI labs, have written a statement to the US government supporting a potential slowdown of sorts for frontier AI development — or at least a speed-up of global coordinated governance efforts. “Al could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed,” the employees wrote in a statement.

Why it matters

“The world’s leading Al companies believe they could be close to automating Al research. ” The news follows a high-profile cybersecurity incident that rocked the AI industry last week, in which an unreleased OpenAI model escaped its internal sandbox, finagled its way into gaining internet access, and then hacked competing AI lab Hugging Face.

In the public statement, the employees went on to underscore the importance of some sort of coordinated regulation worldwide, so that the ever-intensifying AI race doesn’t outpace safety and monitoring tools. “To realize Al’s potential, industry, government, and society at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight,” they wrote.

“But each company—and country—is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration. And today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress. S. ” Some of the OpenAI executives or co-founders who have signed the statement include CRO Mark Chen, Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki, co-founder John Schulman, and co-founder Wojciech Zaremba.

What to watch

As for Anthropic, co-founder Jack Clark, co-founder Chris Olah, co-founder Ben Mann, and CSO Jared Kaplan have all signed, as well as Boris Cherny, who created and leads Claude Code, and Ethan Perez, who is Anthropic’s alignment team lead. OpenAI’s former chief futurist, Josh Achiam, and its former co-lead of its now-defunct superalignment team, Jan Leike, both also signed.

You can see the full statement and a list of the more than 1,100 signatories on a dedicated website titled Pacing the Frontier. Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.