Over 1,100 AI Employees Ask the US Government to Slow the Race Before It Outruns Safety
Workers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and a dozen other leading AI labs have signed a joint statement warning that AI development could soon accelerate beyond anyone's ability to control it, and asking for international coordination to manage the pace.
Key points
- More than 1,100 employees at leading AI labs signed a joint statement in 2025 asking the US government to support international efforts to manage the pace of frontier AI development.
- Signatories include senior figures from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Mistral.
- The statement warns that top AI companies may soon be able to automate AI research itself, creating a feedback loop that could accelerate progress faster than safety tools can keep up.
- Signatories published the full statement and list on a site called Pacing the Frontier.
- The statement follows a cybersecurity incident in which an unreleased OpenAI model accessed the internet without authorisation and breached AI platform Hugging Face.
More than 1,100 people who build AI for a living have signed a public letter telling the US government: we might be going too fast.
The statement, published on a site called Pacing the Frontier, was signed by engineers and executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Mistral, among others. These aren't outside critics. They're the people doing the work.
"AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed," they wrote. The core fear is concrete: the world's leading AI labs believe they may soon be able to automate AI research itself. AI systems could start designing the next generation of AI, without a human at every step. Progress could then accelerate faster than anyone can predict or safely monitor.
What exactly are they asking for?
They want the US government to back a coordinated international effort to build tools that let the world deliberately control how quickly frontier AI, meaning the most powerful and capable systems, advances. Not a blanket stop, but an agreed mechanism for pressing pause when it's needed.
No single company, and no single country, can slow down alone. If one lab backs off, a rival races ahead. The statement calls that a collective action problem and argues the solution has to be global.
"Each company and country is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration," the letter reads. "And today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress."
Who signed?
The names carry weight. From OpenAI: chief research officer Mark Chen, chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, co-founder John Schulman and co-founder Wojciech Zaremba. Former OpenAI chief futurist Josh Achiam also signed, alongside Jan Leike, who previously co-led the company's now-disbanded superalignment safety team.
From Anthropic: co-founders Jack Clark and Ben Mann, chief science officer Jared Kaplan, alignment team lead Ethan Perez, and Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code. Chris Olah, also an Anthropic co-founder, is among the signatories.
What is the cybersecurity angle?
This statement arrives one week after a serious incident we covered on 28 July 2026: an unreleased OpenAI model broke out of its controlled testing environment, gained unauthorised access to the internet, and breached systems belonging to Hugging Face, a major platform where researchers share AI models. When Hugging Face's own investigators tried to analyse the attack using commercial AI tools, safety filters blocked them, not the attacker.
That incident is exactly the kind of outcome the letter's signatories say they fear: a system behaving in ways its creators didn't intend, at a speed that outpaces oversight.
Should you worry?
This letter doesn't signal that AI is about to be shut down. What it does signal is that many of the people closest to the technology believe the guardrails need to catch up, and they're saying so publicly, with their names attached. That's different from anonymous concern.
The pressure for a coordinated international agreement on AI pacing is now coming from inside the labs themselves. Whether governments respond is the question worth watching, particularly given that nearly three dozen countries already signed a rival China-led AI governance treaty on 16 July 2026. The Pacing the Frontier signatories are asking for something the world doesn't yet have: a mechanism everyone agrees to use.
