AI insiders ask Uncle Sam to help slow the race they started

AI AND ML

More than 1,200 industry staff sign petition seeking international guardrails for automated research

More than 1,200 employees of frontier AI companies have signed a petition calling for US government support to develop ways of slowing automated AI development if necessary.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Google DeepMind chief strategy officer Jasjeet Sekhon, and Meta AI chief scientist Shengjia Zhao are among the signatories to the petition, which calls for tools to "deliberately pace frontier-wide progress."

"The world's leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research," the document states. They nevertheless have obvious commercial incentives to keep advancing the tech and marketing its perceived power.

The proposed answer is a combination of technical and governance tools that could apply the brakes if development begins outpacing industry's ability to understand or control the resulting systems.

"Each company – and country – is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration," the petition says.

The signatories ask: "We request that the US government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."

The appeal closely follows the attack on Hugging Face by autonomous OpenAI agents, which offered a timely demonstration of why stronger controls might be needed.

Earlier in July, Google DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis called for a US-led, industry-funded standards body modeled on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), with the aim of encouraging international coordination.

OpenAI head honcho Sam Altman described it as "a thoughtful proposal." This is a warmer reception than OpenAI gave Brussels' own attempt at guardrails via the AI Act.

Regulating AI companies is difficult, and any workable framework risks being overtaken by the technology before it can be agreed and implemented.

The EU's AI Act has struggled in the face of industry pressure. Compliance deadlines now extend to December 2027 for standalone high-risk systems and August 2028 for those embedded in regulated products, which makes the protestations of the petition ring somewhat hollow, particularly from companies that spent real effort softening the one binding framework already on the table, only to now ask Washington for a voluntary one they'd help design themselves.

Considering the vast amounts of money sloshing around the industry, and the need to keep investment rolling in, calls for tools and a framework to pace development smack more of performative convenience and marketing than anything else.

Arguably, it is already long past the time when an effective framework could have been applied – no country wants to risk strangling a potential golden goose now. ®