The Rundown AI / Articles / AI / 1,000+ frontier staffers ask for an AI brake pedal

1,000+ frontier staffers ask for an AI brake pedal

PLUS: Build interactive lead magnets with Canva Code

Zach Mink

July 29, 2026

Good morning, AI enthusiasts, and welcome to the 3,210 new readers who joined us yesterday. Frontier AI labs don't agree on much. But today, 1,000+ of their employees found one thing worth co-signing: the option to slow down.

The statement, signed by members of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and more, calls on the U.S. to back tools that could "deliberately pace" AI progress — before automated research pushes the tech "beyond our ability to understand or control."

In today’s AI rundown:

1,000+ frontier staffers ask U.S. for an AI brake pedal
Zuck pushes superintelligence for all in new op-ed
Build interactive lead magnets with Canva Code
UAE integrating the world's first AI court platform
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI LABS & SAFETY

⏸️ 1,000+ frontier staffers ask U.S. for an AI brake pedal

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Over 1,000 staffers from AI labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, just signed a ‘Pacing the Frontier’ letter, calling on the U.S. to help build tools that could “deliberately pace” AI progress as the world nears autonomous AI research.

The details:

The list covers nearly a dozen labs, including Anthropic co-founders Jack Clark and Chris Olah and chief scientists from OAI, Meta, and Thinking Machines.
The statement does not call for a pause, but instead asks for an international effort to give governments and labs the choice to slow down if needed.
The letter pins the risk on automated AI research, warning models that improve other models could accelerate "beyond our ability to understand or control."
Both OAI and Anthropic endorsed the letter on X, with OAI saying it believes “the world will need to pace the rate of AI advancement” in the future.

Why it matters: The AI era has produced a pile of open letters, but the loudest ones came from outside academics, safety nonprofits, or employees already out the door. This time feels like a vibe shift, with the calls now coming publicly from inside the frontier houses, who see the race nearing a point of no return.

TOGETHER WITH SLACK FROM SALESFORCE

💰 The real ROI of running work in Slack

The Rundown: A new Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study puts a number on what it actually looks like when enterprises run work through Slack as their operating system, and the results are hard to ignore. A composite 25,000-person organization saw 312% ROI over three years, $51M in total benefits, and payback in under 6 months.

In this study, you'll discover:

How teams replaced tool-switching and slow email chains with real-time execution
A 15% win rate uplift for sales teams closing deals faster in Slack
$38.6M net present value driven by collaboration and efficiency gains

Read the report.

💡 Zuck pushes superintelligence for all in new op-ed

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on superintelligence, arguing that open access to the technology will be what actually keeps AI safe instead of being controlled by a few individuals or companies.

The details:

Zuck wrote about superintelligence as a given in the “next few years,” with the question being whether it stays locked behind labs or is accessible to everyone.
He questioned why anyone convinced AI would erase jobs would keep building it, calling safety through an "extreme concentration of power" the real danger.
The CEO also predicts "more jobs in the future, not fewer" if access spreads widely, with cheaper company-building tilting work toward entrepreneurship.
He said “invention, not automation" will be the tech’s top contribution, joining individual empowerment and balance of power as Meta’s core principles.

Why it matters: Zuck never says "open source" once, likely by design, with Meta's newest models drifting from the Llama-era playbook (though Alexandr Wang said open models are on the way). But Meta's real contribution to superintelligence may be distribution, aiming to put frontier-level AI into apps that billions already open daily.

AI TRAINING

🧑‍💻 Build interactive lead magnets with Canva Code

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to create a fun, interactive lead magnet for your company without learning to code, helping you impress prospects and earn more business.

Step-by-step:

Create or open your Canva account. From the homepage, open Canva AI, choose </> Code, and start a new project
Open ChatGPT and describe your offer, target customer, and packages. Ask it to mock up a five-question assessment that helps each visitor find the best fit
Next, ask ChatGPT to write a Canva Code prompt with the questions, answer choices, recommendation rules, results, CTA, brand colors, and voice
Paste the prompt into Canva Code and generate the website. You can click into the design to change text, colors, etc. When done, hit publish and start sharing

Pro tip: To collect emails, add a separate Canva Form connected to Canva Sheets. Test a submission before sharing to fix and find any gaps.

Get resources, prompts, and a full step-by-step video guide here.

PRESENTED BY CONDUCTOR

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In the report, you’ll see:

Your brand's AI mention & citation rate
Gaps vs. competitors in AI answers
Sentiment across major AI engines

Get your free AI Visibility Report.

AI & THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM

👨🏻‍⚖️ UAE integrating the world's first AI court platform

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: UAE Vice President Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed announced a new AI platform set to be integrated across every stage of the country's court system to streamline the judicial process, hailing the tech as the first of its kind in the world.

The details:

The platform will handle tasks like reading case files, surfacing relevant laws and precedents, drafting court documents, and even providing legal analysis.
Humans will review and validate everything the system produces, with final rulings still left entirely to actual judges.
The first phase begins in September, with the remaining pieces phased in over 18 months, stretching from case filings through final judgment.

Why it matters: For court systems buried in case files and slow-moving procedures, AI is an easy sell as a way to speed up the processes. Where things get cloudier is the tech seeping into actual legal recommendations that shape rulings — a Minority Report -type line no other legal system in the world has been willing to cross yet.

QUICK HITS

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📰 Everything else in AI today

Elon Musk revealed that SpaceXAI’s next Grok 4.6 model is set to launch on Aug. 7, with 4.7 following just weeks later, which is ‘better than 4.6 in every way’.

OpenAI and Anthropic have reportedly been pressing Washington to subject their rivals to model reviews as well, coming ahead of Trump's Aug. 1 framework deadline.

Recursive Intelligence partnered with AWS in a multi-year, $410M cloud deal to scale its self-improving system, coming two months after launching from stealth.

Anthropic showed that its Mythos Preview spent 60 hours halving the strength of a quantum-resistant algorithm, though it doesn’t threaten deployed systems.

Ant Group released Ling-3.0-Flash, a model for powering AI agents that it says rivals systems 2-3x its size, with the weights set to go open-source next week.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Hadi Bavili Tabrizi in Amsterdam, Netherlands:

"I make content—posts, articles, and videos—and it brings people to my site. But most visitors would skim for 30 seconds and leave, and nobody used my contact form.

So I built an AI version of myself. I trained it on my own content, including my posts, articles, notes, knowledge, and the way I explain things. It learned not only what I know, but also how I talk and think.

Now it lives on my site and chats with visitors in my voice. As it chats, it identifies who’s a real lead and sends those people to me with the full story. Visitors can ask questions, get answers in my voice, and follow up as deeply as they want.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.