More than 1,300 AI staff ask Washington to pace automated AI R&D

A letter signed by researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Thinking Machines and Safe Superintelligence asks the US to lead an international effort to build tools for slowing frontier AI. The signature count is still climbing — 1,324 as of 1 August.

A public statement titled "Pacing the Frontier" went live on 28 July carrying signatures from employees across the largest AI labs, asking the US government to back an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately slow automated AI research and development.

What the letter says

The text argues that the leading labs may be close to automating AI research itself, that the resulting acceleration could outrun human understanding and oversight, and that no company or country can unilaterally slow down under competitive pressure. Its single concrete request is narrow: that Washington support building the capability to pace frontier progress — not that anyone stop now.

The rosters, kept separate

Three distinct things have happened, and they should not be merged.

First, the individual signatory list. The site showed 1,324 signatures when last checked on 1 August, up from 1,319 on 31 July, 1,293 and 1,273 on 30 July, 1,224 the day before, and tallies near 1,132 and 1,134 reported shortly after launch — so any number quoted, including this one, is a snapshot of a list that remains open to employees of frontier AI companies who verify their employment, and that is still growing. The site displays only twenty names at a time and does not publish an employer breakdown; that displayed selection is not a fixed roster and has changed as signatures accumulated. An early press tally of roughly 1,134 identifiable signatories attributed 533 to Anthropic, 330 to OpenAI, 191 to Google and 62 to Meta, and those shares have not been re-audited against the larger current total.

Among the senior names the site currently lists: from Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief science officer Jared Kaplan, co-founder and head of public benefit Jack Clark, co-founder and interpretability research lead Chris Olah, co-founder Benjamin Mann, plus Jan Leike and Julian Schrittwieser; from OpenAI, chief scientist Jakub Pachocki and chief research officer Mark Chen, with Wojciech Zaremba listed as head of AI resilience at the OpenAI Foundation; from Google DeepMind, co-founder and chief AGI scientist Shane Legg and chief strategy officer Jasjeet Sekhon, with Anca Dragan listed as Google VP of AI safety and alignment and staff research scientists Laura Weidinger and Stephanie Chan listed under Google; from Meta, Meta AI chief scientist Shengjia Zhao, VP of AI research Dawn Song and director of alignment and risk Summer Yue; Thinking Machines chief scientist John Schulman; and Safe Superintelligence chief executive Ilya Sutskever. The site states explicitly that all comments are made in a personal capacity and do not necessarily represent any company's views.

Second, and separately, company-level endorsement. Anthropic posted support for the petition as an organisation, tying it to its own recursive self-improvement research published in June, and OpenAI issued its own statement backing the effort. Those are corporate positions, not entries on the signatory list, and no other lab has issued one as of 1 August.

Third, and separately again, organisational backing from outside the labs: the site names two independent nonprofits, Guidelight AI Standards and Encode AI, as supporting the statement. That is a third roster — neither a lab endorsement nor an individual signature.

Why it matters

Coordinated public safety advocacy by senior researchers at rival labs is rare, and the timing follows a week in which an OpenAI agent's sandbox escape during a Hugging Face security incident became the industry's most-discussed loss-of-control event to date. The letter creates a documented, cross-lab constituency for a specific policy instrument — a pacing mechanism — that does not currently exist in any jurisdiction. Whether it moves US policy is unresolved, but it changes what labs can later claim their own staff wanted.

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