More than 1,100 employees from leading artificial intelligence companies called on the White House to help slow the pace of frontier AI development. The signatories include researchers and executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, and Thinking Machines. AI capabilities are advancing faster than governments and companies can build effective safety and governance frameworks.
The appeal is directed at the Trump administration and asks it to support an international effort to develop technical and regulatory tools. This aims to keep AI progress aligned with human oversight.
The statement reads, “The world's leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our understanding or control of the resulting systems.” It also highlights that each company and country is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration, but today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress.
The letter does not call for a halt on AI development; it calls for the introduction of a ‘pacing mechanism,’ where any innovation in frontier AI must be paralleled by progress in security testing, governance, risk assessment, and international coordination. This will mitigate the risks of having an advanced system with insufficient safeguards in place.
Experts suggest that competitive pressure among AI companies makes it difficult for any single lab to slow development. They believe government-backed coordination is essential to avoid an unchecked race toward increasingly powerful AI models.
Future models could begin improving or designing successor systems with limited human intervention. Critics argue AI capabilities can go beyond the ability of governance systems to monitor or control them.
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