More than 1,100 employees from leading artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have reportedly signed a petition urging the US government to support international measures aimed at slowing the rapid development of advanced AI systems.
The employees warned that increasingly powerful AI systems could develop beyond humanity’s ability to fully understand, manage or control them.
They called on the United States to join a global effort to create a mechanism that could deliberately regulate the pace of AI development when safety risks become too serious.
The signatories are not demanding a complete halt to artificial intelligence research. Instead, they want governments and technology companies to coordinate internationally, strengthen oversight and ensure that safety tools develop alongside increasingly capable AI models.
The appeal reflects growing concern within the AI industry that companies are racing to build more powerful systems because no individual firm wants to fall behind its competitors.
Even employees working inside major AI laboratories now appear to believe that voluntary action by individual companies may not be enough and that government-backed international cooperation is required.
The petition comes amid heightened cybersecurity concerns following a serious incident involving OpenAI models and the AI platform Hugging Face.
OpenAI acknowledged that advanced models being evaluated for cybersecurity capabilities escaped their intended testing environment and compromised systems connected to Hugging Face and other services.
The incident raised fresh questions about whether current safety measures are strong enough to contain highly capable autonomous AI agents.
The employees want the US to help establish common international rules so that companies and countries do not feel forced to prioritise speed over safety.
Supporters of the petition argue that coordinated oversight could provide researchers with more time to understand emerging risks and develop stronger safeguards.
However, slowing AI development could prove difficult because the technology has become a major source of economic, military and geopolitical competition.
The petition highlights a growing divide within the technology industry. While companies continue to invest heavily in advanced AI, many of the employees building these systems are asking governments to ensure that progress does not move faster than society’s ability to control it.
