前沿实验室员工联名信：呼吁为AI发展速度准备协调机制

The most important open letter in years dropped yesterday. This letter noticeably increases my hope that we will manage to not die, and that we will otherwise be able to secure for ourselves a positive future, both by its impact and by the evidence it provides that such a letter can get this level of support. Signed by 1,224 employees of frontier labs including many heavy hitters, and now endorsed by both OpenAI and Anthropic, here is its full text, which I also endorse: AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed. The world’s leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems. 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. But each company—and country—is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration. And today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress. Building on work already underway to monitor frontier model releases: 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.” – 1,224 employees of frontier AI companies​ The ask is to prepare mechanisms for future coordination, not a call to change the pace of development now. I strongly endorse that ask, but even if you disagree with the ask, this shows one thing unmistakably: Many employees of the major labs expect automated AI research to accelerate soon, and they are terrified of what might happen next and how fast things will go. We are not prepared. No matter what else you take away from this, believe that part. Table of Contents A Very Good Letter. Who Signed The Letter. We Need To Prepare Now So We Have The Option To Do This. Words From Some Of Those Who Signed. Words From Others. A Good Start. What The Letter Does Not Say. What Happens Now? A Very Good Letter I would go somewhat farther than the letter does, especially in terms of explicitness about the existential risks that we face, but this letter is: A fully correct position on the merits. A masterfully worded and executed letter. On the Pareto Frontier of what a letter can say versus who would then sign it. An important step towards taking real efforts to make us all not die. Strong evidence that support for us all not dying is stronger than we thought. There were several key moves involved, especially: Drawing the distinction between the action of laying groundwork for future intervention, versus calling for that intervention to take place right now. Drawing the distinction between pacing development, versus previous terms like pause, slowdown or shutdown. Not explicitly calling out the full nature or scope of the existential threats we face. This allows people to sign on so long as they support the necessary current move of getting ready to act, even if they don’t think there is enough evidence yet to pull the trigger, or it is not yet time, and without having to endorse a particular view of the risks we face. The situation is rather overdetermined, so one can and should support this letter’s statement and ask even if you are doubtful of stronger claims. Naturally, the first move of many opponents is to ignore those distinctions, whether or not they even noticed them in the first place. A variety of beliefs are reasonable about whether intervention is needed imminently in order to pace development, and if so what degree of intervention. This was true before we learned of an internal OpenAI model hacking HuggingFace, which should update your perspective. It remains true now. Whereas I believe the letter’s statement would ideally be uncontroversial. We do not know what the future will bring. In many of those futures, we will need the ability to steer outcomes, including via pacing development. This will require cooperation, between companies and ultimately between governments. If we do not lay the groundwork in advance, it will be too late, and we either will be unable to coordinate or will have to do so via much worse mechanisms. Who Signed The Letter OpenAI endorses this letter. OpenAI: At the core of our mission is working through how to ensure increasingly powerful AI benefits everyone. We believe that, at some point in the future, AI acceleration for frontier model development may be so high that the world will need to pace the rate of AI advancement. We hope to contribute to work led by the U.S. government, alongside other labs and the open-source community, to develop the tools and mechanisms that could make that possible. Key figures from OpenAI that have signed include Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki, Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, Cofounder and Head of AI Resilience at the OpenAI Foundation Wojciech Zaremba, Roon, Head of Strategic Futures Dean Ball, Head of Safety Saachi Jain, and former Head of Mission Alignment Joshua Achiam. Jake Halloran: Roon signing the letter as roon goes kinda hard roon (OpenAI): honestly I signed it as my real name but PTF people decided it’s cooler if I’m roon Anthropic endorses the letter. Anthropic: We support this petition, signed by our CEO, several co-founders, and senior staff. Our own research on recursive self-improvement, published last month, points to the need for tools to deliberately pace the frontier of AI development so society can prepare. We’re glad to see broad agreement across the field. Key figures from Anthropic that have signed include CEO Dario Amodei, co-founder Jack Clark, co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan, Co-Founder Benjamin Mann and Co-Founder, Interpretability Research Lead Chris Olah, Jan Leike, Ethan Perez and Claude Code creator Boris Cherney. Key figures from Google DeepMind that have signed include Chief Strategy Officer Jasjeet Sekhon and VP of AI Safety & Alignment Anca Dragan. Other key figures include Meta Chief Scientist Shengjia Zhao, Meta VP of AI Research Dawn Song, Mta Director of Alignment and Risk Summer Yue, Thinking Machines Chief Scientist John Schulman and Inherent Chief Scientist Edward Hughes. A little under half of signatures are from Anthropic as of shortly after the announcement (as of writing this there are now 90 more signatures), with a lot of signatures from OpenAI and DeepMind, and a substantial number from Meta. The only one conspicuously missing here is SpaceX (xAI), or what is left of it. Or by percentage of employee pool as of the evening of the 28th, notice that OpenAI now has more employees than DeepMind does: ⿻ Andrew Trask: Signature Statistics: – Anthropic: 546 / 5,567 = 9.8% – OpenAI: 350 / 10,473 = 3.3% – Google / DeepMind: 199 / 10,219 = 1.9% Total: 1095 / 26,259 = 4% Denominators come from LinkedIn July 28, 2026. Numerators come from “CMD-F” from the website. Efforts seem to have concentrated on the higher end of the employee pools. A lot more than 4% of the biggest names signed. We Need To Prepare Now So We Have The Option To Do This I have been emphasizing this distinction for a while. Do I think we should deliberately slow or even pause the pace of AI development at this time, given the tools we currently have available to do that? Until the hack of HuggingFace, I would have said: No to forcing labs or everyone to do this for the sake of doing it. Our tools for doing this are not good, and also it would be premature. Yes to shifting resources into alignment and safety work. I think this would be selfishly good for the individual labs, and that they are all massively underinvesting here. We are not on the Pareto frontier. If this slowed down ‘raw capabilities’ progress a bit I think that wou