FLI Urges Pause; Industry Issues Responsible AI Guidance

The Future of Life Institute published an open letter signed by more than 800 public figures, scientists and celebrities calling for a pause or prohibition on developing “superintelligence” until there is broad scientific consensus that it can be built safely and strong public support. Notable signatories include AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell; tech founders Steve Wozniak and Richard Branson; public figures such as Prince Harry and Meghan; and political and military figures. Polling released with the letter found broad U.S. support for stronger limits and regulation: 64% said superintelligence should not be built until provably safe, 73% supported robust regulation and 5% favored the current unregulated pace. Separately, a new industry white paper said AI has matured into powerful transformer-based systems and urged businesses to adopt AI responsibly with practical, budget-minded steps plus stronger ethics and governance. The paper and other research highlight that “ecosystem enablers” (memory, storage, energy and cooling suppliers) are capturing structural value as training workloads grow, and that agentic/federated approaches are delivering measurable manufacturing gains (reported 94% predictive accuracy and 43% less downtime) while interoperable “AI operators” are emerging in the enterprise. Researchers and many signatories called for urgent regulatory and safety frameworks, including formal provable guarantees and explainability methods, to reconcile AI’s demonstrated benefits with the risks posed by advanced systems and companies racing ahead.