Almost 1,200 senior employees at the world’s most powerful AI firms have called for an urgent slowdown in the development of the technology.

The technology is in serious risk of developing so quickly that we are unable to “understand or control the resulting systems”, they say in a new open letter.

The letter, titled ‘Pacing the Frontier’, is signed by leaders and top scientists at some of the world’s most powerful AI companies, including ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Deepmind.

It warns that “AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed”. There is a danger that the technology will develop more quickly than our ability to “address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight”, and mean that the technology spirals out of control, it warns.

As such, the letter’s authors call for an urgent slowdown on work on AI models. But it says that the companies themselves would be unable to do so, and that it will require the US government to support an international effort to “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development”.

“If it’s true that AI will be as transformational as electricity, we better be intentional about how it is introduced to the world,” said Laura Weidinger, a staff research scientist at Google and one of the signatories of the new letter. “A mindless race without assurances on governance, safety or the technology serving the public interest stands in the way of such intentionality”.

Writing on X in response to the statement, OpenAI agreed that the pace of development of the technology could become a problem. “We believe that, at some point in the future, AI acceleration ‌for ⁠frontier model development may be so high that the world will need to pace the rate of AI advancement,” it said.

And its rival Anthropic, which makes the Claude system, said that extra time was needed to prepare. “Our own research on recursive self-improvement, published last month, points to the need for tools to deliberately ​pace the frontier ​of AI development ⁠so society can prepare,” it said in a blog post.

Last month, Anthropic already called on its fellow developers of so-called frontier AI models to slow down or temporarily pause development if the technology reached that point of “recursive self-improvement”, where systems would be able to improve themselves. It would be “”good ​for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology,” it said in a blog post in June.

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