More than 1,100 employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta signed an open letter circulated July 28, 2026, urging the U.S. government to build tools for an international pacing mechanism that could coordinate a verifiable slowdown of automated AI development. OpenAI and Anthropic formally endorsed the letter as corporate organizations, but Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a competing op-ed in the Wall Street Journal the same day arguing that the benefits of distributing AI broadly outweigh slowdown concerns. The piece notes that what was once a campaign led mainly by AI skeptics is increasingly championed by co-founders and chief scientists at the labs themselves, who acknowledge that no single lab can afford to unilaterally slow down given competitive pressure.
