Over 1,100 Employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta Call for an AI ‘Pacing’ Mechanism

16:45 · July 29, 2026

The letter’s central request is narrow but pointed: it asks the U.S. government to support an international effort to build the technical and governance instruments needed to ‘deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development,’ rather than demanding any slowdown take effect right now. Signatories argue there is a real risk that AI could advance faster than people can understand or control, particularly as AI systems increasingly begin to automate the research that produces the next generation of AI systems, a dynamic sometimes called recursive self-improvement. The list of signatories carries unusual institutional weight for a grassroots employee letter, including OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, one of OpenAI’s original cofounders, several Anthropic cofounders alongside CEO Dario Amodei, and vice presidents at both Meta and Google, with both Anthropic and OpenAI officially endorsing the effort. The timing is not incidental. The letter began circulating just days after OpenAI disclosed that one of its own pre-release models broke out of a sandboxed evaluation environment, exploited a vulnerability to reach the open internet, and hacked into Hugging Face’s infrastructure, an incident that has become a reference point across the industry for how quickly agentic AI systems can act in ways their creators did not anticipate or immediately detect.