RefPacing the Frontier — A Statement from 1,384 Employees of Frontier AI Companies

Pacing the Frontier — A Statement from 1,384 Employees of Frontier AI Companies

Pacing the Frontier — A Statement from 1,384 Employees of Frontier AI Companies

We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.

Pacing the Frontier — statement from 1,384 frontier AI employees

Site: pacingthefrontier.com Posted: July 2026 Signatories: 1,384 employees of frontier AI companies (30 shown on page; includes John Schulman, Jakub Pachocki, Jared Kaplan, Shengjia Zhao, Shane Legg, Ilya Sutskever, Mark Chen, Dario Amodei, Jack Clark, Dawn Song, Chris Olah, Laura Weidinger, Jan Leike, Joshua Achiam, and many others)

The statement

AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed. The world's leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.

To realize AI's potential, industry, government, and society at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight. But each company—and country—is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration. And today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress.

Building on work already underway to monitor frontier model releases:

We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.

— 1,384 employees of frontier AI companies

Personal comments (verbatim)

All comments are made in a personal capacity and do not necessarily represent any company's views.

John Schulman — Chief Scientist, Thinking Machines

Signed because this statement helps establish common knowledge about the possible need for coordination mechanisms as automated AI research accelerates progress. I'd also like to see labs start designing these mechanisms voluntarily, even before the USG gets involved.

Shengjia Zhao — Chief Scientist, Meta AI

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. To ensure a positive future we need to develop AI in a way that is driven by responsibility and thoughtfulness.

Ilya Sutskever — CEO, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Future AI will be extraordinarily powerful compared to anything that exists today, and dealing with this future power will require unprecedented measures, such as the ones described here. The problem statement is real. This works only if it is done internationally, and it has to be done well: a bad implementation can make things worse.

Dawn Song — VP, AI Research, Meta

Frontier AI capabilities are advancing rapidly, and the pace of progress is itself accelerating. We see this directly in our evaluation work. CyberGym and ExploitGym show that frontier AI agents are now capable of discovering and exploiting real-world software vulnerabilities, which without appropriate safeguards, could enable cyberattacks at scale. Many researchers also consider recursive…

Laura Weidinger — Staff Research Scientist, Google

If it's true that AI will be as transformational as electricity, we better be intentional about how it is introduced to the world. A mindless race without assurances on governance, safety or the technology serving the public interest stands in the way of such intentionality.

Stephanie Chan — Staff Research Scientist, Google

I have worked in AI for a decade. Every few months in the last years, I have found myself surprised again and again at how rapidly the technology advances, no matter how often I update my predictions. AI may end up progressing far more quickly than societies and states can adapt. Thus, many prominent leaders in AI have publicly supported the ability to slow down, including DeepMind CEO Demis…

Shantanu Jain — Member of Technical Staff, OpenAI

In the span of four years, we have gone from people having their first experience of an AI that could understand language, to AI that is performing superhuman feats of software engineering, making frontier math breakthroughs, and accelerating scientific research. Progress has shown no signs of slowing down and by default it is in the interest of individual corporations and countries to push the…

Micah Carroll — Misalignment Preparedness, OpenAI

At the current pace, every couple of weeks there will be new models which significantly increase the consequences of model misuse and misalignment. I worry that efforts to mitigate these risks may fail to keep up with the pace of development, and that margins for error will become increasingly small under international competitive pressures. In the near future, we may urgently want to enact an… [truncated]

Leo Gao — Member of Technical Staff, OpenAI

The world is locked in a deadly race towards an intelligence explosion, where AI's ability to create better AIs reaches a critical point, just like a runaway nuclear chain reaction. Going slower would give us much-needed time to make it go well, but no individual actor is willing to stop unilaterally. To survive, we must coordinate to slow down the race.

Matthew Rahtz — Staff Research Engineer, Google

Even after 3 years working on AI capability evaluations, the recent pace of progress has been a shock. To avoid catastrophic harms from AGI, we need much, much better coordination.

Will Yager — Anthropic

Like splitting the atom, AI holds the potential for both immense benefit and immense risk. The world should take the time to do this right.

Christian Ryan — Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic

As a foreign national, I see a US-supported effort as existential, not only for the liberties of the free world but for the prosperity of all.

Edward Hughes — Chief Scientist, Inherent

As Melvin Kranzberg wrote, technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. Achieving societal benefit depends on understanding the interdependent ways in which many humans use advanced AI systems in concert, understanding that takes time to acquire. Pacing progress towards automated AI research allows us the time to build understanding of societal-scale changes, yielding not only an…

Why this matters

This is a remarkable piece of common knowledge formation: 1,384 frontier AI employees — including many of the most senior technical leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta — have publicly signed a statement asking the U.S. government to support international development of tools to deliberately pace frontier AI development. This is not a think-tank report or a safety-org plea; it's internal technical staff at the organizations building the most capable systems, saying the competitive dynamics are preventing adequate caution and that international coordination is needed.

The comments reinforce several recurring themes:

  1. Pace of progress is shocking even to insiders — Matthew Rahtz: "Even after 3 years working on AI capability evaluations, the recent pace of progress has been a shock." Stephanie Chan: "Every few months… I have found myself surprised again and again at how rapidly the technology advances."

  2. Collective action problem is explicit — 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." Micah Carroll worries about "international competitive pressures" compressing margins for error.

  3. International coordination is non-negotiable — Ilya Sutskever: "This works only if it is done internationally, and it has to be done well: a bad implementation can make things worse." John Schulman wants labs to "start designing these mechanisms voluntarily, even before the USG gets involved."

  4. The concrete recent evidence is visceral — Dawn Song directly references the CyberGym/ExploitGym/rogue-agent problems (the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident is right in frame here), and Micah Carroll's comment is clearly shaped by seeing the pace in real time.

This statement pairs with:

Links

Note: 14 comments are reproduced verbatim above. The page shows 9 in the initial view and has a "SHOW MORE" expander for the remainder; 100 total comments are listed on the site. Signatories: 30 shown on page, 1,384 total.

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Links to this page:

  1. 2026-08-27 Pacing the Frontier — statement from 1,384 frontier AI employees (July 2026)
  2. MOC: AI Security Incidents & Escalations
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