Ai Staffers Urge Us To Help ‘deliberately Pace’ Tech Development

More than 1,100 researchers and executives at leading artificial intelligence companies are urging the U.S. government to back international efforts to develop tools that can “deliberately pace” the development of the world's most advanced AI systems.

Leaders from Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI signed an online petition published Tuesday warning that the current speed of AI progress could outstrip humanity's ability to understand or control increasingly capable 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," the signers wrote. "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."

The petition is notably not calling for a pause or slowdown of AI altogether — as many safety advocates and so-called doomers have proposed — but is asking for governments across the globe to build the technical tools to slow development down if needed.

“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,” the petition continues.

The appeal comes as the Trump administration has embraced an agenda of accelerating AI development to maintain U.S. leadership over China. It also underscores a growing divide within the AI industry and in Washington over how quickly the technology should advance and what safeguards should accompany it.

The petition urges governments to preserve the ability to "buy time" if future AI systems become too powerful to manage safely. Signers include Anthropic co-founders Jared Kaplan, Jack Clark and Benjamin Mann, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Google staff research scientist Laura Weidinger and Meta chief scientist Shengjia Zhao.

Bloomberg News first reported details of the petition.