Top AI researchers call for oversight of automated model development

More than 1,100 AI researchers, including chief scientists from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and NVIDIA, have signed an open letter asking the US government to establish international mechanisms that could deliberately slow or pause AI development. The letter, titled “Pacing the Frontier,” reflects a growing consensus among the people building these systems that the systems might soon be building themselves. The core worry is recursive self-improvement: AI models contributing to their own research and development in ways that could accelerate capabilities beyond what humans can meaningfully oversee. The numbers behind the panic Anthropic disclosed that its flagship model Claude now accounts for roughly 26% of the company’s research and development work. That figure was under 1% just months prior. The academic community has noticed too. A survey of arXiv papers published between July and September 2026 identified over 1,250 works focused on self-improvement in AI systems. A separate effort, organized by the AI Evaluator Forum in September 2026, gathered more than 100 experts who signed a letter advocating for independent evaluators to be embedded at every frontier AI la...