Pacing the Frontier
1,273 frontier-lab employees ask the US government for international tools to pace automated AI R&D
Verified employees across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and SSI — including Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, Jakub Pachocki, Jared Kaplan, Shane Legg, and John Schulman — signed a letter urging the US government to support international options for deliberately pacing automated and recursive-self-improvement AI development. OpenAI and Anthropic issued corporate endorsements the same day. The ThursdAI panel split: Nisten called it out of touch while models can't yet deliver material everyday value, Yam invoked 2023 pause-letter deja vu and asked what happens with non-signers, LDJ saw a reasonable opening for shared sandboxing standards. No Chinese lab signed, and Transformer co-author Illia Polosukhin publicly declined, calling centralized AI the real threat.