{"schema":"postcutoff/event@1","as_of":"2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-03-22-fli-pause-giant-ai-experiments/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-03-22-fli-pause-giant-ai-experiments/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"human editor","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"id":"2023-03-22-fli-pause-giant-ai-experiments","date":"2023-03-22","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Future of Life Institute open letter calls for a 6-month pause on training AI more powerful than GPT-4","deck":null,"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\".","category":"policy-safety","category_label":"Policy & safety","importance":4,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":[{"n":1,"title":"FLI: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter","url":"https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/","type":"official","group":"primary","domain":"futureoflife.org"}],"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["Future of Life Institute"],"title":"Future of Life Institute open letter calls for a 6-month pause on training AI more powerful than GPT-4","summary":"On March 22, 2023, a week after GPT-4's release, the Future of Life Institute published \"Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter\". It calls on all AI labs to immediately pause, for at least six months, the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, and on governments to impose a moratorium if labs won't. Signed by Elon Musk, Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Steve Wozniak and tens of thousands of others, it started the mainstream AI-pause debate.","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)"],"key_numbers":[],"tags":["open-letter","pause","x-risk","governance"],"science":null,"body_md":"## What happened\n\nThe 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.\n\n## Why it matters\n\nIt 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.","disputed":[],"related":[{"id":"2026-07-28-pacing-the-frontier-letter","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-07-28-pacing-the-frontier-letter/","date":"2026-07-28","date_precision":"day","short_title":"1,100+ frontier-lab employees ask the US to build tools to slow AI development","deck":null,"takeaway":"This was the first time senior staff and leaders of competing frontier labs jointly asked for a way to slow the frontier, and two labs endorsed it as companies.","category":"policy-safety","category_label":"Policy & safety","importance":4,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":7,"official":2,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["OpenAI","Anthropic","Google DeepMind","Meta"]},{"id":"2023-05-30-cais-statement-ai-risk","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-05-30-cais-statement-ai-risk/","date":"2023-05-30","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Leading AI scientists sign the one-sentence statement on AI extinction risk","deck":null,"takeaway":"Brought catastrophic AI risk into mainstream policy discourse, paving the way for the Bletchley summit and AI safety institutes.","category":"policy-safety","category_label":"Policy & safety","importance":4,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":2,"official":2,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["Center for AI Safety"]},{"id":"2023-05-01-hinton-leaves-google","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-05-01-hinton-leaves-google/","date":"2023-05-01","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google so he can speak freely about AI risks","deck":null,"takeaway":"When one of the field's founders publicly switched to warning about it, AI x-risk moved into the mainstream.","category":"policy-safety","category_label":"Policy & safety","importance":4,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":5,"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["Google"]},{"id":"2023-03-14-gpt-4","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-03-14-gpt-4/","date":"2023-03-14","date_precision":"day","short_title":"OpenAI releases GPT-4","deck":null,"takeaway":"Defined the frontier for over a year and triggered serious policy attention to AI risk (pause letter, hearings, summits).","category":"model-release","category_label":"Model releases","importance":5,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":2,"official":2,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["OpenAI"]}],"people":[{"id":"elon-musk","name":"Elon Musk","url":"https://postcutoff.com/person/elon-musk/"},{"id":"yoshua-bengio","name":"Yoshua Bengio","url":"https://postcutoff.com/person/yoshua-bengio/"},{"id":"stuart-russell","name":"Stuart Russell","url":"https://postcutoff.com/person/stuart-russell/"}],"posts":[],"videos":[],"models":[],"changes":[{"date":"2026-09-29","type":"filed","text":"Created (primary source checked)"}],"provenance":{"agents":[{"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","maker":"Anthropic","tool":"Claude Code"}],"filed":"2026-09-29","run":null,"sources_read":null,"updated":"2026-09-29","human_review":null,"version":{"date":"2026-10-04"}},"gaps":[{"model_id":"gpt-6-astra","name":"GPT-6 Astra","cutoff":"2026-04","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"claude-opus-5-5","name":"Claude Opus 5.5","cutoff":"2026-06","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"gemini-4-hydrogen","name":"Gemini 4 Hydrogen","cutoff":"2026-03","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"grok-4-7","name":"Grok 4.7","cutoff":"2026-05","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true}],"short_url":"https://postcutoff.com/s/future-life-institute-open"}