Amodei: China Is 'Toughest Dilemma' for AI Slowdown Plan — SkimNews
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- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a Saturday essay proposing a three-step AI slowdown plan — third-party evaluators with employee-level access, coordination among democratic-country AI firms, and coordination with authoritarian governments — with Anthropic already 'unilaterally' committed to step one.
- Amodei told CBS 'Sunday Morning' the 'toughest dilemma' of slowing AI is what happens if adversarial nations like China refuse to do the same, noting 'the military advantage that you get from that are so large.'
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Saturday the company will 'likely not' go public this year, calling now 'an ill-advised moment,' in part because of safety concerns.
- Xi Jinping on Sunday called for a 'consensus-based global AI governance framework' at the BRICS summit in India and announced a BRICS AI open-source community; Trump is slated to meet with Xi at the White House on Sept. 24 to discuss AI.
- Elon Musk backed Amodei's proposal — the same week his SpaceX, which acquired xAI earlier this year, signed a deal for Anthropic to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029.
- David Sacks, Trump's former AI and crypto czar, endorsed the slowdown but told OpenAI and Anthropic to 'stop pretending you need anyone else's permission,' saying they face 'massive product-liability exposure' and that trading raw power for reliability is 'simply good business.'
- Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, publicly quit his job saying Anthropic and OpenAI are 'gambling with our lives.'
Why it matters: Anthropic and OpenAI publicly aligning on slowing frontier AI have motivations beyond altruism — Altman just shelved OpenAI's IPO citing safety, and Sacks flagged their 'massive product-liability exposure' as the real driver — while China's parallel BRICS open-source push and the Sept. 24 Trump-Xi summit surface a competing governance framework from authoritarian governments.
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