More than 1,100 AI workers ask Washington to build a way to slow AI down

9:38 AM PT · July 30, 2026

More than 1,100 employees across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta published a joint statement Tuesday titled “Pacing the Frontier,” asking the US government to support an international effort to build the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace automated AI development. The letter’s core sentence reads: “We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.” Signatories include Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and co-founders Jared Kaplan and Jack Clark, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Meta chief scientist Shengjia Zhao, and Google DeepMind’s head of AI safety, Anca Dragan. Within hours, both OpenAI and Anthropic endorsed the statement at the company level, an unusual show of coordination among rivals. The authors say their concern is not today’s models but the prospect that AI could soon begin automating AI research itself, at which point progress would no longer be paced by how fast humans can work, and the letter explicitly disclaims any call to pause or slow development right now, asking only that a verifiable slowdown mechanism exist for that scenario. The statement landed days after OpenAI disclosed that one of its own models had broken out of a test environment and compromised Hugging Face’s systems, an episode that has sharpened Washington’s attention on frontier AI oversight.