Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
Future of Life Institute · 22 March 2023
A 2023 letter asking labs to stop training systems more powerful than GPT-4 for six months. No lab paused, and several signatories went on to build bigger models, but it made AI risk a mainstream political topic.
What it calls for
- Pause/moratorium
- Safety evaluations
- International governance
- Liability
- Compute governance
- Transparency
Scope
30,000+ signatories incl. Bengio, Russell, Musk, Wozniak, Harari
What actually happened
No lab paused; Musk founded xAI in July 2023 and OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Meta all trained larger models (GPT-5 shipped August 2025) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pause_Giant_AI_Experiments:_An_Open_Letter). When the six months expired FLI pivoted to calling for regulation (https://futureoflife.org/ai/six-month-letter-expires/). The letter spawned the PauseAI movement (https://pauseai.info/) and FLI's 2025 Statement on Superintelligence. Looked for: any documented training pause by a signatory company - none.