Can the AI industry slow down?

In the wake of OpenAI’s accidental hack of Hugging Face, over 1,000 luminaries from the AI industry have called for an international agreement on slowing down the pace of AI development – signatories include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. That kind of deal is unlikely. But without it, unconstrained capitalism won’t allow any company to slow down unilaterally.

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REFERENCES:

Hugging Face post-mortem on OpenAI incident https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline

Announcement of AI Kill Switch Act bill https://lieu.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/reps-lieu-and-moran-introduce-bill-require-kill-switch-ai-systems-can

Pacing the Frontier petition https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/

Wikipedia article on previous call for an AI development pause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pause_Giant_AI_Experiments:_An_Open_Letter

Reuters on suspicious activity of OpenAI agents https://www.reuters.com/business/its-ai-agent-spent-days-hacking-company-sources-say-openai-did-not-notice-week-2026-07-24/