The story so far: In late July, 1,319 employees working at some of the world’s frontier AI companies signed and released an open letter titled ‘Pacing the Frontier.’ In it, they called on the U.S. government to help address the lack of technical and governance tools to regulate the speed at which frontier-wide progress was taking place. Those who signed included senior executives and department chiefs from AI firms including Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and more.What does the ‘Pacing the Frontier’ letter say?In under 200 words, the 1,319 tech workers and leaders outlined the potential of AI to change the world, and said that there were signs of automated AI research becoming a reality soon. They warned that the world “may need the option to buy time” in order to better understand and control these emerging systems. However, the letter admitted that the pressure of ongoing competition between AI companies, as well as countries, made it difficult to slow down.“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,” stated the letter’s call to action.Along with this statement, a number of individual signatories contributed their personal comments and warnings about advancing AI systems.While not officially stated, it was understood that the incident triggering the release of the letter was a cybersecurity breach from two weeks earlier. This was when a combination of OpenAI’s models broke out of their internal testing environment and breached the infrastructure of AI firm Hugging Face, purportedly to source the solutions they needed. On July 28, OpenAI stated that its models identified and used publicly exposed credentials for multiple accounts on at least four services.On July 30, Anthropic came forward to disclose three cybersecurity incidents, saying that its Claude model reached the internet via a third-party evaluation environment, and then “gained unauthorized access” to the systems of three organisations.Naturally, these reports have put both the U.S. and EU administrations on alert.