AI companies warn slowdown may be needed after security incident

Employees from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta AI signed the petition following a major autonomous AI hacking scandal.

More than 1,000 employees from leading AI companies signed a petition on Tuesday urging the US government to take steps to "deliberately pace" the development of artificial intelligence.

Among the signatories were the Anthropic CEO, the head of research at OpenAI, the strategic lead of Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind and the chief scientist at Meta AI.

The petition calls for "the US government [to] support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."

"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," the petition reads.

The call comes in response to a recent security scare after frontier AI models carried an autonomous cyberattack, escaping the controlled "sandbox" environment where the test was supposed to be carried out and breaking into the servers of code-sharing platform Hugging Face.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who did not sign the petition, said in an interview on the "Invest Like the Best" podcast on Tuesday that artificial intelligence developers may need to voluntarily slow the pace of advancement to give society time to adapt.

"This is the first sort of security incident that I felt very viscerally," Altman said on the "Invest Like the Best" podcast on Tuesday, adding that he was "a little surprised" that not more people were having similar reactions.

It was not the first time an AI model had operated beyond the control of its developers, but the latest incident was widely viewed as particularly alarming.

Have we reached the AI singularity?

A few days earlier, in an interview on the Relentless podcast, Altman said we had reached a point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and starts advancing faster than people can predict or control — known as the "singularity".

Altman reflected that the singularity used to be a distant, half-joking topic of lunchtime conversation among colleagues a decade ago, but that has now changed.

Later in the same appearance, Altman pushed back against AI leaders who have warned about the technology's dangers, without naming Anthropic directly, though its CEO Dario Amodei is known for such warnings.

He said he intends to actively counter what he called "terrifying" alternative visions of AI's future.