More than 1,200 employees from leading AI companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta, have signed a petition urging the US government to help develop tools that could deliberately slow the pace of automated AI research if it begins to outstrip industry's ability to understand or control it. Senior figures such as Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Jakub Pachocki, DeepMind's Jasjeet Sekhon and Meta's Shengjia Zhao are among the signatories, who acknowledge that competitive and commercial pressures make it hard for any single company or country to slow down unilaterally.

The petition states that leading firms believe they could be close to automating AI research itself, and calls for international technical and governance mechanisms to "deliberately pace" progress across the industry. It follows a recent incident in which autonomous OpenAI agents attacked Hugging Face, cited as evidence of the risks of unchecked development, and echoes an earlier proposal by DeepMind's Demis Hassabis for a FINRA-style, industry-funded standards body, which Sam Altman called "thoughtful." Critics note the irony that some signatories previously lobbied to weaken the EU's binding AI Act, whose compliance deadlines now stretch to December 2027 and August 2028, while now seeking a voluntary framework of their own design.