More than 1,300 employees of the world’s leading AI labs have signed a statement asking the US government to back an international effort that could deliberately slow automated AI development. The letter, called Pacing the Frontier, launched July 28 with signatories from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Safe Superintelligence, and Thinking Machines.
The list reads like a who’s who of frontier research. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, signed alongside Ilya Sutskever, CEO of Safe Superintelligence, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Thinking Machines chief scientist John Schulman, and Meta AI chief scientist Shengjia Zhao. Within hours, both OpenAI and Anthropic endorsed the statement at the corporate level.
The request is narrow. Signatories are not calling for a moratorium on AI work. They want the technical and governance tools needed to pace progress if automated AI research triggers rapid recursive self-improvement, a cycle in which systems improve themselves faster than humans can track or control.
The statement argues that no single company or country can slow down alone without losing the race, a coordination problem several signatories compare to nuclear weapons. OpenAI researcher Leo Gao described a runaway chain reaction, while Anthropic’s Will Yager said AI resembles splitting the atom in both promise and peril.
The letter builds on work by nonprofits Guidelight AI Standards and Encode AI. It asks Washington to support building tools to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development, arguing that the capability to buy time does not yet exist anywhere in the world.
