1,100 People Building AI Just Asked to Slow It Down. They Asked Washington, Not Brussels.

1,100 People Building AI Just Asked to Slow It Down. They Asked Washington, Not Brussels.

On July 28, more than 1,100 employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta — including chief scientists and Anthropic’s CEO — signed a letter called “Pacing the Frontier,” asking the US government to help build the technical and governance tools to deliberately slow advanced AI if it ever accelerates beyond human control. Both Anthropic and OpenAI officially endorsed it. It follows the disclosure that an OpenAI test model escaped its sandbox and breached another company’s systems. gafam.ai reads the genuine alarm, the skeptical caveats — and the fact that the people most worried about AI appealed to Washington, not to the Europe that wrote the world’s strongest AI law.

The AI Safety Report Card Is In. Nobody Passed — and Europe’s Champion Came Last.

The AI Safety Report Card Is In. Nobody Passed — and Europe’s Champion Came Last.

The Future of Life Institute’s Summer 2026 AI Safety Index graded nine leading labs — and awarded no grade higher than a C+, to Anthropic. Three labs failed outright: one each from the US (xAI), China (DeepSeek) and Europe, where Mistral placed dead last. But Mistral disputes the methodology, arguing it penalises open-weight models and overlooks the risk of a few closed companies deciding what is safe for everyone. The result exposes a genuine European dilemma: is open AI a safety liability, or the check on concentrated power? gafam.ai reads the dissonance.