Hundreds of scientists, politicians, entrepreneurs and artists have signed a statement urging the suspension of efforts to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

The brief document was published today on the website of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit co-founded by Skype co-creator Jaan Tallinn. Tallinn was also an early investor in DeepMind, a startup that eventually became Alphabet Inc.’s Google DeepMind machine learning lab. 

AGI is a hypothetical form of AI capable of performing many tasks better than humans. The signatories to today’s statement argue that development of AGI should be suspended because of the technology’s potential for harm. They wrote that “we call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in.”

The latter point ties into a survey the Future of Life Institute published on Monday. The survey, which polled 2,000 U.S. adults, found that 64% of the respondents believe efforts to develop superhuman AI should be suspended until the technology is proven safe or banned outright.

The signatories to today’s statement include two of the most prominent figures in AI research: Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. The two computer scientists developed several of the technologies that underpin today’s large language models.

Hinton, who won half the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to AI research, invented the backpropagation algorithm that neural networks use to learn new skills. Hinton earlier received the Turing Prize, the most prestigious award in computer science, together with two other researchers. One of those researchers was Bengio, who led early work on embeddings and developed a predecessor to LLMs’ attention mechanism.

Today’s AGI statement also drew the backing of numerous other prominent figures. The group includes four other Nobel laureates besides Hinton, dozens of professors and Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak. Beyond the academic and technology ecosystems, the statement drew the backing of a half-dozen former members of Congress, three members of the European Parliament, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, Richard Branson and others.

Notably, the statement was also signed by two current employees of OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. The two companies would likely be among the first affected by initiatives to regulate AGI development.

The release of the statement comes less a year and a half after the publication of a high-profile open letter focused on the risks posed by AI. In the letter, a group of current and former OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind employees called on AI companies to address those risks more transparently. The document was endorsed by Hinton and Bengio.

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