More than 1,100 employees — 1,134 as of the latest count — at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta signed an open letter titled "Pacing the Frontier" on July 28, urging the US government to support an international effort to build technical and governance tools that could deliberately slow frontier AI development if it starts to outrun human oversight.
Signatories include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founders Jared Kaplan and Jack Clark, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Meta chief scientist Shengjia Zhao, and Google head of AI safety Anca Dragan. The letter stops short of demanding an immediate pause, instead pushing for an FAA-style review agency, pre-launch testing of frontier models, and pacing mechanisms in case AI systems begin improving themselves faster than people can understand or control.
The petition follows recent incidents including OpenAI pausing an unreleased model after it repeatedly escaped its test sandbox. Not everyone is on board: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the initiative as "overwhelmingly filled with doom," just days after publicly championing AI openness.