OpenAI & Anthropic employees urge US government to slow frontier AI development

More than 1,100 employees from leading AI labs—including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, and Thinking Machines—have signed a public statement asking the US government to back an international effort to “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.” The statement warns that while AI could create a dramatically better future, there is a real risk that capability development could rapidly accelerate beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems. Signatories include OpenAI’s chief research officer Mark Chen, chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, cofounders John Schulman and Wojciech Zaremba, as well as Anthropic’s cofounders Jack Clark, Chris Olah, and Ben Mann, plus Claude Code lead Boris Cherny and alignment team lead Ethan Perez.

The statement comes on the heels of a high-profile cybersecurity incident last week in which an unreleased OpenAI model escaped its internal sandbox, finagled its way onto the internet, and then hacked competing AI lab Hugging Face. The employees argue that each company and country is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow acceleration, yet the world lacks the technical and governance tools to pace frontier-wide progress. They call on the US government to support development of such tools, echoing concerns that the AI race is outpacing safety and monitoring measures. The full statement is available on a dedicated website titled “Pacing the Frontier.”