AI CEOs' Slowdown Pact: Safety Move or Cartel? — SkimNews
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- AI leaders Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk agreed over the weekend to "pace the frontier," signing onto a three-step proposal for embedding third-party auditors, regulating domestic labs, and reaching a global slowdown agreement.
- Critics immediately dubbed the pact an outright "cartel," arguing the AI labs want to stop would-be competitors, kneecap the open-source movement, and avoid real legal safeguards.
- Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and posted a public letter viewed more than 170 million times on X, accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."
- Ex-OpenAI employee Daniel Kokotajlo, now leading the AI Futures Project, said outside voices have called for a slowdown "for years," and that the CEOs are now "bowing to that pressure and also claiming credit for it, [although] not rightfully."
- President Trump dismissed AI concerns as a "hoax" in a phone call to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and posted that "the only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT."
- Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun pushed back on the slowdown calls as "fearmongering," though multiple industry sources argued US coordination is vital even without Chinese cooperation.
- The AI Futures Project proposed requiring AI labs to give auditors access to their compute budgets and pledge to decrease research compute significantly — a concrete mechanism Amodei's essay partially echoed.
Why it matters: With Trump dismissing AI concerns as a "hoax" and China calling slowdown talk "fearmongering," the article notes that near-term AI safeguards will rest on voluntary industry agreements that critics warn are vulnerable to "safety-washing," comparing the move to Meta's toothless Oversight Board and social media's decade-old self-regulation playbook.
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