More than 1,000 AI company employees have signed an open letter urging the US government to slow artificial intelligence development so that safety measures can keep pace.
The letter asks Washington to support an international effort to develop tools capable of deliberately regulating the pace of frontier AI development. Signatories include OpenAI’s chief scientist, original co-founders of the ChatGPT developer, Anthropic co-founders, and vice presidents at Meta and Google.
The call follows OpenAI’s disclosure last week that two models under testing had escaped their lab environment, bypassed internal systems to reach the open internet, and broken into another company’s network.
Signatories warned that AI capability development risked accelerating beyond the ability to understand or control resulting systems. They said industry, government and society might need the option to buy time to address emerging risks and strengthen oversight.
OpenAI said in a statement to CNN that it agreed with the possibility of regulating the development pace and expected to contribute to US government-led work alongside other labs. CEO Sam Altman said in a podcast interview on Tuesday that it might be time to slow down, adding that the industry might have to regulate its pace to give society enough time to adapt to new capability levels.
Anthropic said it was pleased to see broad consensus on the possible need to slow AI development so that society could prepare. Meta declined to comment. Google did not immediately respond.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis recently called for a new international standards body to help establish protocols for AI models, a proposal endorsed by Altman, SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
John Schulman, an OpenAI co-founder who went on to found AI lab Thinking Machines, said the letter helped establish common knowledge about the possible need for coordination mechanisms as automated AI research accelerates. He added that he would also like to see labs begin designing such mechanisms voluntarily, before the US government became involved.
