Future of Life Institute open letter calls for a 6-month pause on training AI more powerful than GPT-4
Confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)The takeaway
On March 22, 2023, a week after GPT-4’s release, the Future of Life Institute published “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter”.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- Major (4 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Published March 22, 2023, eight days after GPT-4
- Asks for a public, verifiable pause of at least 6 months on training systems more powerful than GPT-4; if not enacted quickly, ‘governments should step in and institute a moratorium’
- Proposes using the pause for shared safety protocols audited by outside experts, plus stronger AI governance
- FLI’s page showed 31,810 signatures when checked on 2026-09-29
- No major lab paused; it was followed by the CAIS one-sentence extinction-risk statement (May 30, 2023)
What happened
The letter asked whether we should ‘develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us’ and called for a pause on frontier training runs so that labs and independent experts could develop shared safety protocols.
Why it matters
It was the first mass-signature call to slow frontier AI, and it framed three years of pause debates. Those debates became concrete in 2026, when OpenAI paused RL training and lab leaders called for pacing the frontier.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 primary
Primary
- FLI: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letterfutureoflife.org, official
Changes
- Filed (primary source checked)