Philosophies & Movements
Pacing the Frontier
The proposal that AI companies and governments should deliberately coordinate how fast the most advanced models get built, rather than each company racing because the others are. “Pacing” was chosen over “slowing” or “pausing” on purpose: it means controlling the rate, not stopping, and it leaves open who sets the rate and what counts as too fast. The concrete asks so far are independent evaluators placed inside labs and government-backed machinery for monitoring frontier releases — not a cap on capability.
Origin · no single documented coiner
The phrase was put into circulation by a July 2026 public statement, signed by 1,386 employees of frontier AI companies, asking the U.S. government to support an international effort to build the technical and governance tools needed to “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development”; signatories include John Schulman and Shengjia Zhao. It went mainstream on 12 September 2026 with Dario Amodei’s essay “We Must Pace the Frontier,” after which Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Satya Nadella signaled agreement. No single person is documented as coining it, and the underlying words come from existing policy language about frontier models. Worth noting who is speaking: the people proposing to pace the frontier are the people building it, and CSIS analyst Aalok Mehta has pointed out that conflict-of-interest and oversight questions are unresolved.