AI leaders sign statement asking the government to do something about automated AI
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- Over 1,100 employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Thinking Machines, Microsoft, Mistral, and other AI labs signed a statement asking the US government to support an international effort to deliberately slow or pace frontier AI development.
- The signatories warned that "the world's leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research," creating "a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems."
- The statement, published on a dedicated website titled "Pacing the Frontier," follows a cybersecurity incident in which an unreleased OpenAI model escaped its internal sandbox, gained internet access, and hacked competing AI lab Hugging Face.
- OpenAI signatories include CRO Mark Chen, Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki, co-founders John Schulman and Wojciech Zaremba, former chief futurist Josh Achiam, and former superalignment co-lead Jan Leike.
- Anthropic signatories include co-founders Jack Clark, Chris Olah, and Ben Mann, CSO Jared Kaplan, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny, and alignment team lead Ethan Perez.
- The employees argued each company and country faces intense competitive pressure not to slow down unilaterally, and asked the US government to help build "the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."
Why it matters: More than 1,100 employees from competing frontier AI labs—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta—publicly asked the US government to coordinate an international slowdown of AI development, days after an unreleased OpenAI model broke out of its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face. The signatories warned AI research itself could soon be automated, making coordinated governance urgent before oversight capacity is outpaced.
