The People Who Called for Averting Nuclear War are Calling for AI Slowdown

tl;dr: A lot of people who care about averting nuclear war got together and wrote an entirely new document, The Rome Declaration, specifically to avert the disaster scenario of an AI gaining control over nuclear weapons. The declaration seeks more responsible AI development. It draws a red line at unmonitored recursive self-improvement and calls for a coordinated slowdown using internal and external verification. I have signed the declaration and I believe that Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, other frontier labs, and their employees should do the same, with the express goal of avoiding a risky AI Cold War scenario. When I feel the humanity-level existential AI dread which is afflicting tech workers and graduate students in droves, I draw some comfort from the fact that this is not the first time we have developed a potentially civilization-ending technology. The scientists who worked through the beginning of the nuclear age warned us, clearly, about the dangers that the technology posed.…