Employees across major AI labs sign statement urging AI slowdown

Employees from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Thinking Machines, Microsoft, Mistral, and other AI labs signed a statement asking the US government to act on the risks of automated AI research. The statement argues leading AI companies believe they may be close to automating AI research itself, which could sharply accelerate capability development.

Why it matters: A cross-company employee statement is harder to dismiss as one lab's messaging than a single executive's comments, signaling shared internal concern specifically about automating AI research rather than AI capability in general. Read alongside Altman's apparent shift and the OpenAI/Hugging Face agent intrusion story above, this looks like a coordinated moment of industry unease rather than an isolated statement.