In a joint statement, employees from the leading AI labs are calling on the US government to pursue international coordination. Their argument is simple: no single company or country can slow things down alone.
Under the title "Pacing the Frontier," more than 1,200 employees from frontier AI companies have signed a statement urging the US government to back an international initiative. The goal is to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately steer the pace at the frontier of automated AI development.
The text is brief. It doesn't call for a stop or a pause. Instead, it asks for the ability to hit the brakes if needed. The leading companies believe they are on the verge of automating AI research, the statement reads. There's a real risk that capabilities advance faster than the ability to understand or control the resulting systems. The key sentence addresses competitive dynamics: every company and every country faces pressure not to slow down on its own. Tools to coordinate across the frontier don't exist yet.
The signatories don't actually agree with each other
The list reaches deep into leadership ranks. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei signed, along with co-founders Jared Kaplan, Jack Clark, Benjamin Mann, and Chris Olah. OpenAI's Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki and Chief Research Officer Mark Chen are on the list, as are Meta AI Chief Scientist Shengjia Zhao, Google DeepMind's Chief Strategy Officer Jasjeet Sekhon, and Anca Dragan, who leads AI Safety and Alignment there. John Schulman, Chief Scientist at Thinking Machines, also signed. The nonprofits Guidelight AI Standards and Encode AI helped organize the statement.
