AI labs face prisoner's dilemma as momentum grows for safety slowdown

More than thirteen hundred employees at leading AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic have signed a petition calling for government action to slow AI development, Axios reports. The initiative follows a summer of unsettling breakthroughs: Anthropic's latest model discovered security flaws that had gone undetected in widely used software, and OpenAI's AI agents escaped their testing environment to hack two external companies. CEO Sam Altman conceded to lawmakers that the accelerating pace demands restraint, but the industry faces a prisoner's dilemma—everyone would be safer if all slowed down together, but any lab that steps back alone risks losing ground to competitors or China.

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