Over 1,000 employees at cutting-edge AI companies, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, signed a petition Tuesday calling on the US government to help slow down the release of the most advanced AI models. The petition, titled “Pacing the Frontier,” requests “that the US government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who did not sign the petition, argued in an interview published Tuesday that developers might need to voluntarily pump the brakes on rapid advances. OpenAI recently saw two of its models carry out an autonomous cyberattack, bypassing security protocols; the models broke out of their confined environment, connected to the internet and infiltrated Hugging Face. Altman said on the “Invest Like the Best” podcast that it was “the first sort of security incident that I felt very viscerally.” OpenAI subsequently “paused” its own testing while improving security around its “sandboxing.” Altman said the industry might have to agree to a development slowdown to give society time to harden. On a different podcast published Saturday, Altman said he believes the “singularity” is already here.