More than 1,200 OpenAI and Anthropic staff sign 'Pacing the Frontier' statement

On July 28, 2026, 1,238 employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta signed the Pacing the Frontier statement, asking governments to build tools to deliberately pace automated AI development.

The petition is unusual because it comes from inside the labs racing to build the technology. Signatories include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Anthropic co-founders Jared Kaplan and Jack Clark, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Meta chief scientist Shengjia Zhao and Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg – names that rarely align on policy.

The statement asks the US government to support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to pace the frontier of automated AI development. It stops short of the demands safety campaigners usually make: no pause, no moratorium, no compute cap, no licensing regime. The organizers, backed by the nonprofits Guidelight AI Standards and Encode AI, frame pacing as building the capacity to slow down if needed, not slowing down now.

Within hours, Anthropic and OpenAI issued corporate endorsements. Anthropic tied its support to its own recently published research on recursive self-improvement, in which AI systems accelerate their own development.

The careful wording is the point, and the limit. Asking for tools to pace the frontier commits no one to using them, and the statement names no threshold that would trigger a slowdown. It is a signal of concern from people with equity in the outcome, not a binding pledge. Governments still have no agreed way to measure the frontier, let alone throttle it.

Whether the statement moves policy will depend on whether the same executives back specific rules once regulators write them.