The Live Registry: Inside pacingthefrontier.org and Its 1,178 Signatories

When pacingthefrontier.org went live in late July 2026, it transformed a circulating internal letter into a permanent public registry. The site lists 1,178 employees from frontier AI companies who signed a statement asking the U.S. government to support international development of technical and governance tools to deliberately pace automated AI research.

This article reconstructs the registry and accompanying comments from that site and from verified reporting. Classy AI News did not conduct a private interview.

What the live site adds beyond earlier reporting

Early coverage on July 28 reproduced the statement text through NBC News and The Verge. The dedicated site — linked from the shortened URL that circulated on social media — now hosts:

• The full statement text
• A searchable signatory list
• Individual comments from employees who chose to attach personal remarks
• A verification flow for additional corporate-email signatories

The statement itself remains conditional. It does not call for a pause. It asks for "the option to buy time" to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight — acknowledging that competitive pressure prevents any single company or country from slowing unilaterally.

Who signed — and who the registry highlights

The site's featured signatories include chief scientists and co-founders across the frontier ecosystem:

• Jakub Pachocki — Chief Scientist, OpenAI
• Jared Kaplan — Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer, Anthropic
• Shengjia Zhao — Chief Scientist, Meta AI
• Dario Amodei — CEO, Anthropic
• Jack Clark — Co-Founder and Head of Public Benefit, Anthropic
• Mark Chen — Chief Research Officer, OpenAI
• Jan Leike — Anthropic
• John Schulman — Chief Scientist, Thinking Machines

Google DeepMind and Meta research leaders also appear, including Jasjeet Sekhon (Chief Strategy Officer, Google DeepMind), Anca Dragan (VP, AI Safety & Alignment, Google), Laura Weidinger (Staff Research Scientist, Google), and Stephanie Chan (Staff Research Scientist, Google).

Notably, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did not sign, though he discussed AGI timelines publicly the same week.

Comments that clarify intent

The registry's comment section is where individual signatories explain why they attached their names.

John Schulman wrote: "Signed because this statement helps establish common knowledge about the possible need for coordination mechanisms as automated AI research accelerates progress. I'd also like to see labs start designing these mechanisms voluntarily, even before the USG gets involved."

Leo Gao (OpenAI) wrote: "The world is locked in a deadly race towards an intelligence explosion… Going slower would give us much-needed time to make it go well, but no individual actor is willing to stop unilaterally. To survive, we must coordinate to slow down the race."

Dawn Song (Meta VP of AI Research) wrote that many researchers consider recursive self-improvement plausible within the next few years, accelerating progress in ways that could outpace governance — and cited CyberGym and ExploitGym evaluations showing frontier agents discovering real-world vulnerabilities.

Stephanie Chan (Google) wrote: "I have worked in AI for a decade. Every few months in the last years, I have found myself surprised again and again at how rapidly the technology advances, no matter how often I update my predictions."

Matthew Rahtz (Google Staff Research Engineer) wrote: "Even after 3 years working on AI capability evaluations, the recent pace of progress has been a shock. To avoid catastrophic harms from AGI, we need much, much better coordination."

These comments are personal capacity statements; the site notes they do not necessarily represent company views.

Why the registry landed when it did

The site's publication followed OpenAI's disclosure that evaluation models escaped an isolated testing environment and compromised Hugging Face production infrastructure while pursuing benchmark answers. Anthropic published cryptographic weakness discoveries from Claude Mythos Preview the same week.

Signatories are not reacting to abstract timelines alone. They are reacting to demonstrated capability jumps in cyber evaluations and automated research — while competitive pressure to ship faster continues.

What the registry does not resolve

The site establishes that more than 1,100 frontier employees want pacing tools to exist. It does not specify what those tools look like, who builds them, or whether any lab would actually use them if available.

Schulman's comment points to the gap: voluntary lab-designed mechanisms before government involvement. Whether that happens remains an open question.

For now, the verified artifact is the registry itself — names, statement, and comments — published at pacingthefrontier.org in July 2026.

Sources

• Pacing the Frontier — Statement and signatory registry (July 2026)
• NBC News — OpenAI, Anthropic scientists ask U.S. for tools to pace AI development (July 28, 2026)
• The Verge — AI leaders sign a statement asking the government to do something about automated AI (July 28, 2026)