Employees of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google ask the US Government to regulate the pace of AI development

More than a thousand employees at artificial intelligence companies OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have asked the US government to support measures and tools that help “deliberately set the pace” to prevent the development of this technology from accelerating to a point where it can no longer be controlled.

Employees of the main frontier artificial intelligence model companies have signed an open letter in which they ask to reduce the pace of development, because they believe that the capabilities of this technology will reach a point where the resulting systems can no longer be “understood or controlled.”

In their manifesto, although they include the potential benefits that AI can have for society, they no longer do so as a statement but rather with a conditional time when pointing out that “it could contribute to creating a much better future”, but they recognize that “this result is not guaranteed.”

Given the proximity of reaching the automation of research, and that the impact of this advance can lead to losing control of this technology, the signatories – 1,178 at the time of writing this news – have addressed the United States Government with the request that it get involved in slowing down work on artificial intelligence.

They argue that there is a need to “deliberately regulate progress in this field”, since in addition to the benefits that have been promised from the beginning for industry, government and society, the emerging risks that arise from artificial intelligence must also be addressed.

To do this, to “gain time” to investigate these risks, they claim that security measures must be “developed and supervision strengthened”, but they also understand that it is a joint effort and they request the Government to “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools necessary to deliberately set the pace of the development of automated AI.”

This manifesto, titled ‘Pacing the Frontier’, is endorsed by Anthropic’s co-founder and chief scientific officer, Jared Kaplan; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei; the Director of Research at OpenAI, Mark Chen; and the Vice President of AI Security and Alignment at Google, Anca Dragan, among others.

The document does not have the signature of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has recently spoken about AI security on the ‘Invest Like the Best’ podcast, hosted by Patrick O’Shaughnessy.

In it, Altman conceded that “we may have to moderate the pace of AI development to give society enough time to adapt to some of these new levels of capability,” but believes it needs to be done without “looking like a regulatory grab for everyone and without it looking like collusion between cutting-edge labs.”

“I’m terrified of a world where real fears about AI are used to say: ‘Only this small group of people can have it because it’s too dangerous, and only they understand it, but don’t worry, they will make the right decisions for all of us.’ I don’t believe in that,” he added.