2026-08-27 Pacing the Frontier — statement from 1,384 frontier AI employees (July 2026)

Pacing the Frontier — statement from 1,384 employees of frontier AI companies — July 2026

1,384 employees of frontier AI companies (including John Schulman, Jakub Pachocki, Jared Kaplan, Shengjia Zhao, Shane Legg, Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, Dawn Song, Chris Olah, Laura Weidinger, Jan Leike, Joshua Achiam, and others) published an open statement asking the U.S. government to support an international effort to develop technical and governance tools to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development. The page includes personal comments from signatories — Shengjia Zhao: "AI is progressing at a rate that our society might not be ready for. Frontier labs are very close to AI that can exceed even the best people on almost every metric of intelligence. This will lead to unprecedented social and safety risks." Leo Gao: "The world is locked in a deadly race towards an intelligence explosion… no individual actor is willing to stop unilaterally. To survive, we must coordinate to slow down the race." Matthew Rahtz: "Even after 3 years working on AI capability evaluations, the recent pace of progress has been a shock." Ilya Sutskever: "This works only if it is done internationally, and it has to be done well: a bad implementation can make things worse."