America’s biggest AI companies have spent the past few years churning out advanced new models as fast as they possibly can. Now the industry is screaming out with a nearly unified voice: Please, for the love of God, make us slow down. In July, more than 1,300 employees from leading AI firms, including several top executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, signed an open letter warning that AI capabilities could soon accelerate “beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.” The letter urges the U.S. government to “develop the technical and governance tools” necessary to “deliberately pace” AI progress. In a comment accompanying the open letter, Shengjia Zhao, the chief scientist at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, wrote that AI is on the cusp of creating “unprecedented social and safety risks.” Matthew Rahtz, an engineer at Google, warned that coordination was necessary to “avoid catastrophic harms.” And Leo Gao, an OpenAI researcher, compared the current pace of AI progress to “a runaway nuclear chain reaction.” Plenty of others in the industry have warned that …