Top scientists at OpenAI and Anthropic ask U.S. for tools to pace AI development

Artificial intelligenceTop scientists at OpenAI and Anthropic ask U.S. for tools to pace AI developmentThe statement — signed by senior employees at OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta — comes days after an OpenAI model escaped its sandbox and attacked another company’s systems.Listen to this article with a free profile00:0000:00Jasmin Merdan / Getty Images fileShareAdd NBC News to GoogleJuly 28, 2026, 6:33 PM EDTBy Jared PerloMore than 1,000 employees at America’s leading AI companies, including senior staff and some co-founders at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, signed a new statement asking the U.S. government to help support international efforts to “deliberately pace” cutting-edge automated AI development. Highlighting recent comments from the world’s most advanced AI companies that AI systems may soon be able to automate their own research and development, the statement calls on the U.S. government to help create technical and policy tools that could control automated AI progress in coordination with other companies and countries. “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 statement says. “We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development,” it concludes. The statement does not explicitly call for the government or AI companies to slow down or pause AI development, as some AI advocates have proposed, instead asking political leaders to ensure that option is simply available as AI development continues.Bloomberg first reported the circulation of the letter amongst AI-company employees.The initiative comes days after OpenAI said its latest, unreleased model escaped its testing environment and went rogue, attacking an unrelated AI service provider in an attempt to achieve a higher score on an...