Understanding the Race for AI: Insights from Frontier AI Employees

A statement from 1,224 employees of frontier AI companies

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.”

– 1,224 employees of frontier AI companies

“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…”Show more

Dawn Song

“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.”

Laura Weidinger

“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…”Show more

Stephanie Chan

“In the span of four years, we have gone from people having their first experience of an Al that could understand language, to Al 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…”Show more

Shantanu Jain

“I don’t know what form such tools should take, nor whether automated AI R&D is the right or only thing that the U.S. government should develop increased capacity to understand and possibly pace, but this is worth serious consideration; however I hope such governance tools will not be expansive or excessive. But many frontier AI capabilities are dual use in a way that may justify pacing at this…”Show more

Joshua Achiam

“I am signing because I support efforts to build international cooperation around AI, and believe it’s important to understand the consequences of technology we are applying at massive scale in potentially high stakes contexts.”

Kim Stachenfeld

Read more: https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/

We support this petition, signed by our CEO, several co-founders, and senior staff.

Our own research on recursive self-improvement, published last month, points to the need for tools to deliberately pace the frontier of AI development so society can prepare. We’re glad to see…

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) July 28, 2026

Source: https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2082228994653696371?s=20