Recently, 1,134 employees from leading AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta jointly signed an open letter, urging the U.S. government to support international cooperation in developing the necessary technologies and governance tools to "consciously pace" AI development when needed. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI,罕见ly expressed support for this initiative.

The initiative is called "Pacing the Frontier," and signatories include Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, co-founder Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Chief Scientist Yakub Peharzki and Chief Research Officer Mark Chen of OpenAI, Chief Scientist Shengjia Zhao of Meta, Anca Dragan, head of AI safety and alignment at Google DeepMind, and John Schulman, Chief Scientist at Thinking Machines, among others.

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The core concern of the open letter is "automated AI development"—the ability of AI systems to develop and improve AI on their own, a concept known in the industry as "recursive self-improvement." Anthropic previously stated that its Claude series models are rapidly approaching this threshold. The letter states: "It is difficult to accurately predict how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is indeed a real risk that the development of AI capabilities may quickly outpace our ability to understand or control these systems."

OpenAI responded on the X platform: "We believe that at some point in the future, AI acceleration in frontier model development may be so rapid that the world will need to pace the speed of AI progress." Anthropic, meanwhile, said: "Our research released last month on recursive self-improvement shows that we need certain tools to consciously regulate the pace of AI development, giving society time to prepare."

Altman's shift in stance has attracted particular attention. In the past, he avoided signing initiatives calling for slowing down AI development. A similar open letter from 2023 was criticized by him as "lacking key technical details about what specific areas should be paused." However, in a recent episode of the "Invest Like the Best" podcast, he stated: "We may need to pace the development of AI, giving ourselves enough time for society to adapt to these new capability levels and establish protective mechanisms. At the same time, we also need to find ways to do this without making anyone feel it's regulatory capture or collusion between leading AI labs."

Currently, AI companies are competing to develop increasingly powerful systems, and there is growing concern that the pace of AI development may exceed the capacity of existing security measures, governance systems, and regulatory mechanisms. This joint letter indicates that anxiety over "uncontrolled acceleration" has moved from the margins to the mainstream within the AI industry.