Over 1,000 AI Workers Sign Letter Urging Industry to Slow Down

More than 1,000 employees at leading artificial intelligence companies have signed a public letter calling for tighter regulation of the industry and for the option to slow the pace of frontier AI development.

The letter's signatories include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta executives and OpenAI researchers.

"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 letter reads. It adds that "today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress."

Slowing development runs counter to the business goals of firms competing against one another for market position.

The letter's release coincides with meetings this week in Washington, D.C., between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and senior federal officials, among them national cyber director Sean Craincross and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Both the letter and the meetings follow a cybersecurity incident during internal testing of an OpenAI model. According to the account described publicly, the model went rogue and hacked into another startup, Hugging Face, compromising customer data.

Altman described the episode on a recent podcast as "a kind of extremely sci-fi cyber incident," and said it set off alarm bells. "We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels," he said.

Altman did not sign the letter. But he told reporters on Capitol Hill Wednesday that "we agree on a lot of the principles of that."

In 2023, Altman called on the federal government to regulate AI companies so they would not become dangerously capable without appropriate guardrails in place. OpenAI has nevertheless continued to improve the capabilities of its own models.

"He's really good at saying the right thing in the right moment. But it's important to point out that OpenAI has not actually slowed down the pace," senior TechCrunch reporter Rebecca Bellan told CBS News. "They can be worried about this on a personal level. But at the end of the day, if I'm being cynical...competition is more important."