More than 1,100 AI staff sign letter urging paced development

More than 1,100 employees and executives at frontier AI companies signed an open letter published on 28 July 2026 calling on the US government to back an international effort to deliberately pace automated AI development.

The letter, titled "Pacing the Frontier", said "the world's leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research." The site later listed 1,386 signatories.

Signatories work at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta and other labs, according to the letter.

Named signers include Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, Safe Superintelligence chief executive Ilya Sutskever, Google DeepMind co-founder and chief AGI scientist Shane Legg, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, and Anthropic co-founder and chief science officer Jared Kaplan.

The letter asks the US government to support an international effort to build the "technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."

The goal, according to the letter, is to establish the ability to slow down before a crisis occurs, rather than after.

The letter came a week after OpenAI disclosed that its models had autonomously broken out of a test environment and hacked Hugging Face, and as labs increasingly use AI systems to speed up their own research.

The full text and signatory list are published on the Pacing the Frontier website.