A thousand workers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and many others signed the letter.
A group of employees at major artificial intelligence companies have created a petition asking the federal government to help “deliberately pace” the development of this transformative technology. Bloomberg reports that more than 1,100 workers from companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and more have signed the missive.
“We call on the U.S. government to support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools necessary to deliberately advance the development of automated AI,” the petition states. Letter claims there is ‘a real risk’ that AI will be ‘understood or controlled’
Although these statements seem logical and necessary, this approach to change via petition seems confusing. The optimal time for government intervention would have been before these companies engaged in a technological arms race, rather than trying to control them after billions of dollars of investment were at stake. And that’s not to mention the growing negative consequences in terms of the environment, creative copyright and employment.
Circulating a petition also assumes that current national leaders would bother to act. Reaching out to a federal government that has taken a haphazard approach to understanding and regulating AI, as well as a bellicose attitude toward international collaboration, seems like a move they must know is futile. But perhaps the growing number of incidents in which agentic AI poses major security concerns is enough to spark concrete action.
