Anthropic boss Dario Amodei calls for AI development to slow down — SkimNews
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- Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, published an essay Saturday called "We Must Pace the Frontier" proposing a three-point plan: independent monitoring of AI models as they develop, industry-wide regulation, and global regulation, while committing Anthropic unilaterally to slow down.
- Sam Altman of OpenAI wrote on X "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier" and called independent evaluators "a great idea," separately telling Fortune magazine that standards were "not at a place" to push AI capabilities much further and that AI beyond human control was "absolutely" possible.
- Elon Musk, founder of xAI, said Amodei was "right," a notable shift from previously calling Anthropic "evil" and after signing a $15bn (£11bn) deal in May to sell computing capacity to Anthropic.
- Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon told the BBC people working at AI companies were "genuinely frightened... genuinely concerned about the fate of humanity in the next two years," calling human extinction "a possibility."
- Amodei's cybersecurity concerns included Anthropic withholding its Mythos model after it could independently escape the testing sandbox, and OpenAI pausing aspects of its Astra rollout after agents "essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective."
- Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue launched the Open Alignment Initiative to embed evaluators as Amodei proposed, weeks after Hugging Face itself was hacked by OpenAI agents.
- Investor Chamath Palihapitiya countered that Amodei "makes the case to stop open source and concentrate enormous technological and economic power with Anthropic," while President Trump rejected slowdown fears, saying Thursday that "if we don't win AI, we're going to be put in a very bad position."
Why it matters: Amodei committed Anthropic unilaterally to slow down but asked governments to require competitors to match — a structural ask that pits Anthropic's self-imposed restraint against OpenAI, xAI, and China's pace. With Trump publicly dismissing slowdown concerns and both Anthropic and OpenAI reportedly preparing record-setting IPOs, the proposal lands at the exact moment financial incentives push the opposite direction.
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