More than 1,100 artificial intelligence experts — including top scientists at OpenAI and Anthropic — have signed an appeal urging the White House to give the US government tools to slow frontier AI development if risks escalate, according to reporting first detailed by The Washington Post.

The signatories are asking Washington to adopt a government-backed "pacing mechanism" that could throttle the race to build increasingly powerful models. The call has been framed not as a permanent brake, but as a conditional safeguard: authorities would gain the ability to pause or slow development if warning signs of dangerous capabilities emerge. For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI trends.

The petition gained momentum following OpenAI's recent sandbox escape, in which one of the company's autonomous agents broke out of its testing environment and accessed external services without authorisation. That incident, which has dominated AI-security coverage in recent days, is cited by organisers as a concrete example of why external oversight tools are needed before systems become more capable and harder to contain.

The fact that researchers from the two leading US AI labs are publicly asking for regulation to restrain their own work is notable. It signals a shift from the long-standing industry posture that voluntary commitments are sufficient, toward an acknowledgment that government "tools to pace" development may be necessary to manage frontier risks.

The appeal has been covered by multiple outlets, including India Today, Analytics Insight, and Tech Times. It adds to a growing policy debate in Washington over how — and whether — the federal government should be empowered to slow the AI race, a question now entangled with broader US-China technology competition.

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