Over 1200 AI Practitioners Sign Joint Letter: We May Need to "Voluntarily Pause" Advanced AI Development

On July 28, 2026, 1,293 cutting-edge AI employees including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta jointly released the "Pacing the Frontier" initiative, urging the U.S. government to support international cooperation in developing technologies and governance tools to "proactively slow down" the research and development of autonomous AI. The initiative does not call for an immediate pause, but rather the establishment of coordinated slowdown mechanisms. Both OpenAI and Anthropic publicly endorsed the initiative in their corporate capacities, with the background involving AI recursive self-improvement research and recent industry safety incidents.