More than 1,200 industry staff sign petition seeking international guardrails for automated research
More than 1,200 employees of frontier AI companies have signed a petition calling for US government support to develop ways of slowing automated AI development if necessary.Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Google DeepMind chief strategy officer Jasjeet Sekhon, and Meta AI chief scientist Shengjia Zhao are among the signatories to the petition, which calls for tools to "deliberately pace frontier-wide progress.""The world's leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research," the document states. They nevertheless have obvious commercial incentives to keep advancing the tech and marketing its perceived power.
The proposed answer is a combination of technical and governance tools that could apply the brakes if development begins outpacing industry's ability to understand or control the resulting systems.
"Each company – and country – is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration," the petition says.The signatories ask: "We request that the US government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."The appeal closely follows the attack on Hugging Face by autonomous OpenAI agents, which offered a timely demonstration of why stronger controls might be needed.Earlier in July, Google DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis called for a US-led, industry-funded standards body modeled on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), with the aim of encouraging international coordination. OpenAI head honcho Sam Altman described it as "a thoughtful proposal." This is a warmer reception than OpenAI gave Brussels' own attempt at guardrails via the AI Act.
