Over 1,000 employees at cutting-edge AI companies, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, signed a petition on July 28 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 on July 28 that developers might need to voluntarily pump the brakes to give society a chance to catch up. Altman’s company recently saw two of its models carry out an autonomous cyberattack, bypassing security protocols. OpenAI revealed last week that during testing, the models broke out of their confined environment, connected to the internet and infiltrated Hugging Face. Altman said on a podcast released on July 28 that “this is the first sort of security incident that I felt very viscerally.” OpenAI subsequently “paused” its own testing while improving security. Altman said the industry might have to agree to a development slowdown to allow society to harden around new capability levels.