AI Insiders Urge US Government to Support Global Guardrails
A statement signed by 1,132 employees of frontier artificial intelligence companies called on the U.S. government to support an international effort to “deliberately pace” the frontier of automated AI development.
The statement said that as the world’s leading AI companies near the ability to automate AI research, there is a risk that they could lose control of 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,” the statement said. “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.”
Some of the first listed signers of the letter are John Schulman, chief scientist at Thinking Machines; Jakub Pachocki, chief scientist at OpenAI; Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief science officer at Anthropic; Shengjia Zhao, chief scientist at Meta; and Anca Dragan, vice president, AI safety and alignment at Google.
The statement, “Pacing the Frontier,” was published with organizational support from independent nonprofits Guidelight AI Standards and Encode AI, according to the website on which it is posted.
Other efforts around AI safety have been announced in recent days.
Nvidia announced Monday (July 27) that it is leading 36 other companies in an AI safety coalition focused on open models. The Open Secure AI Alliance will strive to identify and remediate vulnerabilities using open technologies.
When announcing the organization, Nvidia said in a blog post that the effort came in the wake of a cybersecurity incident in which OpenAI models targeted tech company Hugging Face.
“That incident showed a practical truth: when defenders cannot inspect, adapt and run advanced AI on their own infrastructure, their ability to respond is constrained at exactly the moment speed matters most,” the post said. “Companies and countries need open frontier defensive tools and techniques so critical industries can build security systems across a multi-vendor ecosystem and avoid single points of failure.”
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said that weak AI regulation can produce worse safety outcomes than imposing no regulation at all.
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