Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and Ja Rule were some of the top signatories that have erroneously appeared on an open letter called “Pause All Giant AI Experiments,” published by the non-profit The Future of Life Institute.

Before the letter’s press embargo was lifted, both Altman and Gates were listed at the top of the list of signatories. Altman’s inclusion in the letter was particularly surprising, because it appeared that he was calling on his own company to stop training the rumored next version of OpenAI’s large language model GPT-5.

When I emailed Future of Life Institute last night for comment on Altman and Gates’ inclusion on a previous version of the letter, Anthony Aguirre, the non-profit’s VP and Secretary of the Board responded, “The signatures of Sam Altman and Bill Gates were fake, and we removed them and tightened our vetting process as soon as we were made aware of them.”