AI Leaders Pledge Slowdown — Critics Cry Cartel — SkimNews
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- Altman, Amodei, Hassabis, and Musk loosely agreed over the weekend to slow AI development, signing onto Amodei's three-step proposal to embed third-party auditors, regulate domestic labs, and pursue a global slowdown agreement.
- Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and posted a public letter viewed more than 170 million times on X, accusing AI companies of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."
- More than 1,000 AI lab employees signed a July public letter calling for a slowdown after the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident — ex-OpenAI's Daniel Kokotajlo said CEOs are "bowing to that pressure and also claiming credit for it, [although] not rightfully."
- The AI Futures Project proposed labs give auditors access to their compute budgets and pledge to decrease research compute significantly — Amodei's essay already named METR, Apollo, and Redwood Research as potential embedded auditors.
- President Trump dismissed AI concerns as a "hoax" in a speakerphone call to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang onstage, posting that AI only needs "a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT."
- Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun called slowdown calls "fearmongering," though Redwood Research's Buck Shlegeris and others argued US coordination remains vital even without Chinese cooperation.
Why it matters: The CEOs' verbal agreement is widely seen by safety researchers as a real response to outside pressure but lacks enforceable teeth — Trump dismissed concerns as a "hoax," China won't cooperate, and critics like NYU's Nick Reese compared the gambit to social media platforms' pre-emptive self-regulation playbook. The next test is whether Amodei's proposed third-party auditors — METR, Apollo, Redwood Research — get genuine compute-budget access or just produce safety paperwork that leaves development speed unchanged.
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