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.
AI leaders sign statement asking the government to do something about automated AI
The statement follows a recent high-profile cybersecurity incident that rocked the AI industry.
The statement follows a recent high-profile cybersecurity incident that rocked the AI industry.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images
“Al could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed,” the employees wrote in a statement. “The world’s leading Al companies believe they could be close to automating Al research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate Al progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.”
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. Building on work already underway to monitor frontier model releases: We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated Al development.”
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. 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.
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