The "Pacing the Frontier" statement
In late July 2026 employees of frontier AI companies published the statement 'Pacing the Frontier', asking 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 first Wayback Machine capture of its site is 28 July, with 1,122 signatures; on 10 October the page shows 1,386.
Why it matters
Employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta and others, among them heads of research, ask for the option to 'buy time', and themselves note that no company or country under competitive pressure can slow down alone. The statement does not ask for a pause. It precedes the essays by Pachocki (6 September) and Amodei (12 September).
The statement's text (paraphrased). The leading companies believe they could be close to automating AI research; there is a real risk that capability development accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the result; industry, government and society may need the option to 'buy time' to address risks, develop security measures and strengthen oversight; but each company and country, under competitive pressure, does not slow down unilaterally, and the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace progress across the whole frontier. The request: that the US government support an international effort to develop such tools. The statement names no trigger, threshold or enforcement body, and says nothing about open weights. Who signed and how it is shown. The page lists signatories with their titles (among them Dario Amodei, Jakub Pachocki, Jared Kaplan, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Shane Legg, Mark Chen, Shengjia Zhao). The comments are 'made in a personal capacity and do not necessarily represent any company's views'. Organisational support came from two independent nonprofits, Guidelight AI Standards and Encode AI. Date and number. The page prints only 'July 2026'. The day is that of the first Wayback Machine capture (28 July, 20:10 UTC, 1,122 signatures); later captures show 1,178 (29 July), 1,346 (4 August), and the live page on 10 October 1,386. The signature count is a live counter. What the record does not claim: that the companies as such endorsed the statement (reports of that in third-party posts were not read); that signatures were verified in any way other than the page says; that the US government responded.