#TeamHuman: Keep Humans in Control of AI

The Problem

AI is developing too rapidly for humanity to stay in control.

AI could be the best thing that ever happens to humanity. It could also be the last. A handful of companies are locked in an arms race, building the most powerful technology in human history as fast as they possibly can, with no oversight, no democratic accountability, and, by their own admission, without fully understanding what they’re building.

How many jobs have to vanish?

How much of the internet has to be fake?

How many creators have to be buried under AI slop?

How many artists have to compete with copies of themselves?

How many scams and deepfakes? How many elections undermined?

How many kids have to grow up shaped by algorithms no parent chose?

How close do we get to surveillance dystopias, AI-designed pandemics, killer robots?

Or, as experts keep warning, literal human extinction?

This situation is insane. And we all know it.

The Plan

Slow down. Give humanity time to figure out how to stay in control.

The root cause of all these dangers is the global AI arms race, which creates a race-to-the-bottom on safety and doesn’t give humanity time to figure out how to regulate it effectively.

The root cause

Many regulations are harmful or unhelpful. We need humanity’s best and brightest working on this, but it could take years to get the regulations right.

In TeamSeas, the goal was cleaning up beaches. Then we discovered most of the ocean’s trash came from just three rivers. If we didn’t address the root cause, the beaches would just get dirty again. Most proposed AI regulation is cleaning the beaches. The arms race is the river.

If you’re driving 100 mph in fog, and you think there’s a cliff somewhere ahead, you slow down. That’s common sense. That’s what we need to do with AI.

The solution

We demand one thing: slow down AI.

We join the hundreds of Nobel Prize winners, AI experts, and heads of state who signed the Superintelligence Statement, calling for a prohibition on developing smarter-than-human AI until there is 1) broad scientific consensus that it can be done safely and controllably, and 2) strong public buy-in.

The experts agree. Here is how it gets done:

Build the brakes. Frontier AI is built with specialized chips: track and guard them, exactly like we track the ingredients for nukes and bioweapons. Governments set the speed limits on giant training runs.

Enforce the speed limit. An international agreement between the US, China, and major nations: slow down together and enforce real safety standards. The International Atomic Energy Agency verifies nuclear compliance worldwide. We need the same watchdog for AI.

All four leading AI companies agree things may be going too fast. They say they would slow down if the others did. Recently, more than 1,000 of their own employees signed an open letter calling on the government to help make a slowdown possible. But none of them can stop unilaterally. That’s what governments are for. And governments won’t act without public pressure.

That’s where we come in.
We are the pressure.

We’ve Done This Before

Humanity has come together many times.

Yes, we can slow down, and it would be easy compared to other problems humanity has solved. We can do this.

We limited nuclear weapons

You can’t just buy the ingredients for nukes. They’re tracked and guarded. We can track and guard the chips used to produce frontier AI the same way.

We saved the ozone layer

The world faced a hole in the sky. Countries coordinated, industry adapted, and the ozone layer is healing today.

We eradicated smallpox

A disease that killed hundreds of millions, wiped off the planet by countries vaccinating together. The World Health Organization declared it gone in 1980.

We agreed on rules for war

Even sworn enemies signed the Geneva Conventions. If humanity can agree on limits in wartime, it can agree on limits for AI.

We saved an entire continent

Since 1959, the Antarctic Treaty has kept an entire continent unclaimed, unarmed, and reserved for science.

We restricted thousands of dangerous technologies

Bioweapons, chemical weapons, human cloning: humanity has agreed on bans and restrictions together, thousands of times.

Every time, it took international cooperation, and ordinary people who refused to be silent.
It’s time to do it again.

Why We Signed

Illustrative voices
from the creators.

Creators are standing up with their audiences, because this is our moment, this is our fight, and the window is closing.

PLACEHOLDER: our team wrote these example quotes to show what this section will look like. They are not real statements from these creators. Real quotes will replace them.

MrBeast

400M+ subscribers

I signed because I’m concerned we’re building the most powerful technology in history with nobody at the wheel. We slowed down for nukes. We can slow down for this.

Signed the pledge

Mark Rober

70M+ subscribers

I signed because I’m an engineer, and no engineer would ship something this powerful without testing it. Right now, nobody’s running the tests.

Signed the pledge

Marques Brownlee

20M+ subscribers

I signed because I review technology for a living, and even the people building AI admit they don’t fully understand it. That should concern all of us.

Signed the pledge

Derek Muller · Veritasium

18M+ subscribers

I signed because the scientists I trust most, including hundreds of Nobel laureates, are calling for red lines on AI. When the experts are this worried, we should listen.

Signed the pledge

Emma Chamberlain

12M+ subscribers

I signed because I’m concerned about kids growing up shaped by algorithms no parent chose, on an internet where you can’t tell what’s real anymore.

Signed the pledge

Ryan Trahan

16M+ subscribers

I signed because deepfakes and AI scams are already using creators' faces to steal from the people who trust us. And it’s getting worse every month.

Signed the pledge

Cleo Abram

6M+ subscribers

I signed because I’m an optimist about technology, and real optimism means steering, not just accelerating. Slowing down is how we get the good future.

Signed the pledge

Casey Neistat

12M+ subscribers

I signed because a handful of companies are making decisions for all of us, and nobody voted for that. The public deserves a say in our future.

Signed the pledge

Hank Green

4M+ subscribers

I signed because the internet was built by humans, for humans. I want the next generation to grow up in a world where people are still the point.

Signed the pledge

+ more creators signing every day.

Join the movement to keep
humans in control of AI.

AI is developing too rapidly for humanity to stay in control.