More than 1,200 employees at AI firms, including top executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google, have signed on to a statement calling for an “option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight” in the face of “a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.” AI could “help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed,” they say. Companies and countries are under “intense competitive pressure” not to slow things down unilaterally, the statement says, and the world currently lacks “the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace fronter-wide progress.”

The statement is notable less for what it says — in smaller numbers, AI researchers and some industry executives have been making similar arguments for years — than for all the people who signed it and the context in which it was published: shortly after OpenAI, in the course of testing a new model, accidentally allowed the model to mount a sophisticated cyberattack against another company. There’s a fresh sense of urgency here, but there’s also a lot of precedent: The AI world has produced a number of safety-focused public letters, sharing some of the same signatories, in the last decade. In 2015, a Future of Life Institute letter signed by, among thousands of others, then- and future founders of DeepMind and OpenAI, noted a “broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase” and called for “research on how to make AI systems robust and beneficial.” A 2017 follow-up proposed 23 principles, including active cooperation “to avoid corner-cutting on safety standards” in an AI race, alignment with “human dignity, rights, freedoms, and cultural diversity,” and strict safety and control measures for “AI systems designed to recursively self-improve or self-replicate.”

The most direct ancestor to this statement is the 2023 “Pause” letter, calling for a six-month halt to model-training of systems “more powerful than GPT-4” in order to “jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen........

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