Pacing the Frontier: 1,300+ AI Lab Employees Ask the US to Back Tools to Deliberately Pace AI Development

Employees at frontier AI companies published an open letter titled “Pacing the Frontier” in late July 2026, asking the US government to support “an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development”¹².

As of August 2, the letter had 1,324 signatories, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Jared Kaplan, Safe Superintelligence CEO Ilya Sutskever, Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg, and OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki¹. The letter states that “AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed”¹. According to the letter’s site, organizational support came from two nonprofits, Guidelight AI Standards and Encode AI¹.

Sources

1. Pacing the Frontier - The open letter itself (July 2026)
2. Employees from the world’s biggest AI companies want the US to be ready to slow AI development - CNN Business (July 28, 2026)