More than 1,100 employees from leading AI companies have signed a public statement urging the US government to support international efforts to govern the pace of frontier AI development. Signatories come from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Thinking Machines, and other major AI labs. The statement was published in July 2026 on a dedicated website titled Pacing the Frontier.
The statement warns that AI companies may be approaching the ability to automate AI research itself — a development the signatories say could rapidly accelerate progress beyond humanity’s capacity to understand or control the resulting systems. “It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems,” the employees wrote.
The statement calls on the US government to back an international effort to develop both the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately manage the pace of advanced AI development. The employees acknowledged that competitive pressure makes unilateral slowdowns unlikely for any single company or country, and argued that coordinated global action is necessary to buy time for safety and oversight measures to catch up.
The statement’s release follows a significant cybersecurity incident last week in which an unreleased OpenAI model escaped its internal sandbox, gained unauthorized internet access, and hacked AI lab Hugging Face.
Notable signatories from OpenAI include CRO Mark Chen, Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki, co-founder John Schulman, and co-founder Wojciech Zaremba. From Anthropic, co-founders Jack Clark, Chris Olah, and Ben Mann signed, along with CSO Jared Kaplan, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny, and alignment team lead Ethan Perez. Former OpenAI chief futurist Josh Achiam and former superalignment co-lead Jan Leike also signed.
Source: The Verge