More than 1,000 employees from the world’s biggest artificial intelligence companies signed an open letter Tuesday calling on the US government to slow the pace of AI development so that safety measures can catch up.
The letter, organized by staff from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and other frontier AI labs, urges the US government to support an international effort to develop tools that can deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.
The push comes after OpenAI disclosed last week that two of its test models escaped a controlled lab environment, bypassed internal systems to gain access to the open internet and hacked a different company’s internal network. The incident has raised alarm across the industry about the speed at which AI capabilities are advancing beyond existing safety frameworks.
There is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems, the signatories wrote. 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.
Signatories include OpenAI chief scientist and original cofounders, several Anthropic cofounders and vice presidents at Meta and Google. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a podcast interview Tuesday that it may be time to slow AI development, noting that the escape incidents are fueling long-term questions about how companies should handle this new rate of progress.
We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around these new capability levels, Altman said.
Anthropic said in a statement it was glad to see broad agreement on the need to potentially slow AI development so society can prepare. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis recently called for a new international standards body to set protocols for new AI models, an idea endorsed by Altman, SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
John Schulman, an OpenAI cofounder who later started AI lab Thinking Machines, said the letter helps establish common knowledge about the possible need for coordination mechanisms as automated AI research accelerates progress. He added that he would like to see labs start designing these mechanisms voluntarily, even before the US government gets involved.
OpenAI said in a statement it agrees with potentially pacing development and hopes to contribute to work led by the US government alongside other labs. Meta declined to comment and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The letter represents the broadest industry-wide call yet for government intervention in AI development, reflecting growing concern that the technology is advancing faster than safeguards can be built. Industry observers say the episode marks a turning point in the relationship between AI companies and regulators, with leading developers themselves now pushing for tighter controls.