Companies endorse employees' call for tools to slow AI race
But we should probably be past the "preserve optionality" phase by now
The petition we reported on yesterday, where over 1,000 staff at frontier AI companies called for the development of governance tools to preserve the option to slow the AI race, has been getting a fair amount of media attention.
The newer articles added the news that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has added his name, and that while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hasn’t added his name, the company itself endorsed it with a statement that reads:
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.
And Altman himself, on a podcast clip released yesterday, said it might be necessary to “pace the rate of AI development,” echoing the language of the statement.
Everyone is still carefully maintaining the hedge in the statement that this is about maintaining the option to slow down, and not a call to actually slow down at this time.
While I’m with those who think the “maintain optionality” conversation was more appropriate to the pre-Hugging Face attack era, and that there are now more than enough red flags to warrant a full and immediate pause, I’m less bothered by the hedging than some. For many signatories, the statement already reflects a large shift. I’ve seen some of them apologizing for the necessity of it on social media.
Many may yet make the full U-turn and start calling for a halt. I wish those who anticipate eventually doing so would follow Connor Leahy’s advice to “just update all the way, bro,” but they might need time. I just hope we’re talking weeks or months, not months or years, because wow are things moving fast.
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