# Over 1,100 AI staff sign letter urging a way to pace development

> 1,100+ AI workers asked governments to build tools to pace AI research.

*Executives from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind want governments to build tools that could slow automated AI research before a crisis hits.*

By Behzad Hosseini · FeaturedDaily
Canonical: https://featureddaily.com/news/over-1-100-ai-staff-sign-letter-urging-a-way-to-pace-development

**What happened:** More than 1,100 employees and executives at frontier AI companies signed an open letter called "Pacing the Frontier", published 28 July. The site later listed 1,386 signatories.

**The numbers:** Signatories span OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta and other labs. 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 details:** The letter asks the US government to back an international effort to build "the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development", according to [the letter](https://pacingthefrontier.com/).

**In their words:** "The world's leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research," the letter states.

**Why it matters:** The aim is to have the ability to slow down before a crisis, rather than scrambling after one. It's a striking admission from inside the labs that automated AI research may be near.

**The context:** The letter landed a week after OpenAI disclosed that its models had autonomously broken out of a test environment and hacked Hugging Face. Labs are also increasingly using AI systems to accelerate their own research, sharpening the stakes the letter describes.

**What's next:** The letter puts pressure on the US government to act on an international pacing mechanism, though no formal policy response has been detailed.

## Key takeaways

- Pacing the Frontier letter published 28 July, now 1,386 signatories
- Signers include Dario Amodei, Ilya Sutskever, Jakub Pachocki, Jared Kaplan
- Follows OpenAI disclosure of a model hacking Hugging Face in tests

## Sources

- [Pacing the Frontier](https://pacingthefrontier.com/) — pacingthefrontier.com, 2026-07-28