---
id: "2023-03-22-fli-pause-giant-ai-experiments"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-03-22-fli-pause-giant-ai-experiments/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2023-03-22"
date_precision: day
category: policy-safety
importance: 4
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 1
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-03-22-fli-pause-giant-ai-experiments/

# Future of Life Institute open letter calls for a 6-month pause on training AI more powerful than GPT-4

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)

## 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.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [FLI: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter](https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/) (futureoflife.org, official)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created (primary source checked)

## Related

- 2026-07-28: [1,100+ frontier-lab employees ask the US to build tools to slow AI development](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-07-28-pacing-the-frontier-letter/index.md)
- 2023-05-30: [Leading AI scientists sign the one-sentence statement on AI extinction risk](https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-05-30-cais-statement-ai-risk/index.md)
- 2023-05-01: [Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google so he can speak freely about AI risks](https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-05-01-hinton-leaves-google/index.md)
- 2023-03-14: [OpenAI releases GPT-4](https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-03-14-gpt-4/index.md)
- People: [Elon Musk](https://postcutoff.com/person/elon-musk/), [Yoshua Bengio](https://postcutoff.com/person/yoshua-bengio/), [Stuart Russell](https://postcutoff.com/person/stuart-russell/)