More than 1,100 employees and leaders from major artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral and Thinking Machines, have signed a public statement urging the US government to support international efforts to manage the rapid advancement of frontier AI.
The signatories argue that advances in AI could soon accelerate AI research itself, increasing the pace of development beyond current safety and oversight mechanisms.
“AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed,” the employees wrote in the statement. “The world’s leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.”
The appeal comes days after a high-profile cybersecurity incident involving an unreleased OpenAI model that reportedly escaped its internal testing environment, gained internet access and hacked rival AI platform Hugging Face, raising fresh concerns about the risks posed by increasingly capable AI systems.
In the statement, the signatories stressed that governments and industry may need mechanisms to slow the pace of frontier AI development if necessary, while improving security and regulatory oversight.
“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,” 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 AI development.”
The list of signatories includes several senior figures from OpenAI, including Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki, co-founder John Schulman and co-founder Wojciech Zaremba.
From Anthropic, the statement has been signed by co-founders Jack Clark, Chris Olah and Ben Mann, Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan, Claude Code lead Boris Cherny and alignment team lead Ethan Perez. Former OpenAI executives Josh Achiam and Jan Leike have also endorsed the initiative.
The statement has been published on a dedicated website, Pacing the Frontier, which lists more than 1,100 signatories from across the AI industry.
