OpenAI is calling for the formation of an international organization to oversee AI development. And to slow it down, if necessary: “One goal of such an organization should be to make it possible for the world to take coordinated action, including slowing frontier development when needed, so societal resilience, safety, and alignment can keep pace,” the company wrote in a blog post published Monday. The memo, written by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, follows a similar statement from OpenAI’s chief rival, Anthropic, which said last week that unilaterally tapping the brakes on global AI development “would likely be a good thing,” assuming such a move were possible. Anthropic’s rationale was based on internal evidence of what it described as “recursive self-improvement”; that is, AI models capable of training the next, more advanced versions of themselves, thereby presenting new possibilities for quicker advancements in the field as well as new risks around humans losing control.
The possibility of such an “intelligence explosion”—occurring as a byproduct of commercial incentives being prioritized over safety concerns—was also a key factor behind a 2023 open letter calling for a six-month pause on the development of frontier AI models, which was signed by Elon Musk, AI “godfather” and Turing Award-winner Yoshua Bengio, and other big names in tech.
