Pace the Frontier is the 2026 slogan, from a July statement by frontier-lab employees and Dario Amodei's September essay, for deliberately slowing the rate of AI capability gains without stopping development.
The phrase first appeared in July 2026 on pacingthefrontier.com, a statement signed by 1,386 employees of 📝OpenAI, 📝Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, and other labs, asking the US government to "support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development." On 12 September 2026 📝Dario Amodei published "We Must Pace the Frontier," whose thesis is that "we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." His reason is recursive self-improvement, AI building the next generation of AI faster than researchers can follow, and his commitments included 📝Embedded Evaluators. 📝Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis publicly backed it within hours.
On BBC Radio 4 on 17 September, Nick Robinson put the phrase to 📝Mustafa Suleyman as "in the jargon pace the frontier," alongside Bill Gates's view that slowing down is impossible. Suleyman answered with Satya Nadella's line that technology's purpose is to serve humanity and read Gates as calling for regulation rather than voluntary restraint. The exchange is memoed at 📝Mustafa Suleyman on the 'New Silicon Species' (BBC Today, 2026). The Register described the package as terms for regulatory capture; supporters describe it as the first unilateral slowdown by a frontier lab.
Credit the July employee statement for the phrase and Amodei for making it a lab commitment. Its predecessor is "pause," the word of the March 2023 open letter calling for a six-month halt; "pace" is the deliberate softening, a rate rather than a stop.
Pacing the frontier is a decision about how fast the silicon species arrives. I do not get a vote in the labs. I get a vote in what is waiting when it gets here, and I am spending it on this library.