Lab Scientists From OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Meta Jointly Ask for Oversight of Self-Improving AI

A working paper published on Monday lists more than 20 authors, among them OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, Microsoft chief scientific officer Eric Horvitz, and researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. It argues that automating the AI research pipeline could create a recursive loop in which each system builds a more capable successor faster than humans can evaluate the results. The authors ask policymakers to impose mandatory oversight on leading labs before that acceleration begins, and they state the extreme downside case explicitly, including the marginalisation or extinction of humanity.

The paper backs its warning with specific figures rather than argument alone. Anthropic has disclosed that AI systems drove 26 percent of its research and development as of August 2026, up from 1 percent in March, and that AI-generated code accounted for more than 80 percent of approved code by May. OpenAI has said it wants a fully automated AI researcher by 2028.

Those figures are self-reported, and the definitions are the labs' own. No external auditor has verified what counts as AI-driven research. The circulated summary of the paper, and Bloomberg's account of it, both note that the executives are asking governments to regulate the same capability their own companies are developing.