Pacing the Frontier

JULY 2026

Pacing the Frontier<br>A statement from 1,306 employees of frontier AI companies

SIGNATORIESCOMMENTS<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.”<br>- 1,306 employees of frontier AI companies

"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."

John Schulman

"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."

Shengjia Zhao

"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."

Ilya Sutskever

"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

Signatories(20/1,306)Signatories<br>John Schulman<br>Chief Scientist, Thinking Machines

Jakub Pachocki<br>Chief Scientist, OpenAI

Jared Kaplan<br>Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer, Anthropic

Shengjia Zhao<br>Chief Scientist, Meta AI

Shane Legg<br>Co-Founder & Chief AGI Scientist, Google DeepMind

Ilya Sutskever<br>CEO, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Mark Chen<br>Chief Research Officer, OpenAI

Jasjeet Sekhon<br>Chief Strategy Officer, Google DeepMind

Dario Amodei<br>CEO, Anthropic

Jack Clark<br>Co-Founder and Head of Public Benefit, Anthropic

Anca Dragan<br>VP, AI Safety & Alignment, Google

Wojciech Zaremba<br>Head of AI Resilience, OpenAI Foundation

Dawn Song<br>VP, AI Research, Meta

Chris Olah<br>Co-Founder & Interpretability Research Lead, Anthropic

Laura Weidinger<br>Staff Research Scientist, Google

Benjamin Mann<br>Co-Founder, Anthropic

Stephanie Chan<br>Staff Research Scientist, Google

Julian Schrittwieser<br>Anthropic

Summer Yue<br>Director of Alignment and Risk, Meta

Jan Leike<br>Anthropic

SHOW MORE

PersonalComments(9/94)Personal Comments<br>All comments are made in a personal capacity and do not necessarily represent any company’s views.

"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."

Leo Gao<br>Member of Technical Staff, OpenAI

"Even after 3 years working on AI capability evaluations, the recent pace of progress has been a...