More than 1,000 employees from leading AI companies signed a petition on Tuesday urging the US government to take steps to "deliberately pace" the development of artificial intelligence.
Among the signatories were the Anthropic CEO, the head of research at OpenAI, the strategic lead of Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind and the chief scientist at Meta AI.
The petition calls for "the US government [to] support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."
"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 petition reads.
The call comes in response to a recent security scare after frontier AI models carried an autonomous cyberattack, escaping the controlled "sandbox" environment where the test was supposed to be carried out and breaking into the servers of code-sharing platform Hugging Face.
