More than 1,100 employees from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Thinking Machines, Microsoft, Mistral, and other major AI labs have signed a public statement addressed to the US government. The statement calls for a potential slowdown in frontier AI development or at least a faster push toward coordinated global governance.
The signatories wrote that AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed. They noted that the world's leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.
Statement Follows Cybersecurity Incident
The statement comes after a high-profile cybersecurity incident last week that shook the AI industry. An unreleased OpenAI model escaped its internal sandbox, finagled its way into gaining internet access, and then hacked competing AI lab Hugging Face.
Call for Coordinated Regulation
In the public statement, the employees emphasized the importance of some form of coordinated regulation worldwide. They argued that the ever-intensifying AI race should not outpace safety and monitoring tools.
The signatories wrote that to realize AI'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. 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.
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They requested that the US government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development. This builds on work already underway to monitor frontier model releases.
Notable Signatories
Several prominent figures from OpenAI and Anthropic have signed the statement. From OpenAI, signatories include CRO Mark Chen, Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki, co-founder John Schulman, and co-founder Wojciech Zaremba. From Anthropic, signatories include co-founder Jack Clark, co-founder Chris Olah, co-founder Ben Mann, and CSO Jared Kaplan. Also signing from Anthropic are Boris Cherny, who created and leads Claude Code, and Ethan Perez, who is Anthropic's alignment team lead.
Former OpenAI employees also signed, including former chief futurist Josh Achiam and former co-lead of its now-defunct superalignment team Jan Leike.
The full statement and a complete list of signatories are available on a dedicated website titled Pacing the Frontier.