2023 pause letter
The 2023 pause letter. Pause training of systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months, everywhere, verifiably.
What it does
The 2023 open letter asking every AI lab to stop training systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months.
Applies to: All labs training systems more powerful than the frontier.
- All AI labs immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
- The pause should be public and verifiable and include all key actors.
- If it cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.
What's in it: U.S. 6-month pause
Where things stand
Signed by more than 31,000 people including Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak. No lab paused.
Why it costs ~7 weeks
Six months without large training runs. Research continues and labs partly catch up after the pause, so a year later America is about a month and a half behind where it would have been.
Biggest unknown: Whether the pause would have been universal, which was the letter's own condition.
Why it lowers p(doom) by ~0.2%
The 2023 open letter: a six-month pause so safety can catch up.
The strongest case that it costs more
The letter's own condition was that the pause include all key actors. As written, it is not a unilateral policy and its lead cost under its own terms is zero. As it would have been implemented, it was unilateral. The menu prices the implementable version.
The debate
For
- Future of Life Institute wrote the 2023 open letter calling for a pause of at least six months, now with more than 31,000 signatures.
- Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell were among the letter's best-known signers, 2023.
- PauseAI campaigns to stop development of the most powerful general AI systems until they can be made safe.
- Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar introduced a bill to pause advanced AI development until a new federal regulator is running, September 2026.
Against
- Bill Gates said asking one group to pause doesn't solve the challenges, 2023.
- Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng held a public talk titled Why the 6-month AI Pause is a Bad Idea, 2023.
Sources
Rough starting points, not precise forecasts. Lead costs assume China doesn't depend on U.S. models, the case least favorable to safety laws, and count 3 years. On the menu you can change every assumption and put in your own numbers. Last priced 2026-09-26.