Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on Saturday, urging AI companies to pace how quickly they improve model capabilities, and both Sam Altman and Elon Musk responded within the day expressing support.
Amodei’s essay lays out a three-step plan meant to temper the AI industry’s development pace without stopping it outright. “To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this,” he wrote.
Anthropic claims it has already taken the first step itself. The company has “unilaterally” committed to giving third-party evaluators employee-level access so they can verify its safety practices and report incidents, a move Amodei said comes without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.” The second step calls on leading AI companies in democratic countries to coordinate around common safety standards. The third, and most ambitious, asks for coordination between democratic and authoritarian governments.
Amodei’s statements that the U.S. must maintain its lead in the AI race over China echoes Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s statements at a Breitbart News event last week:
“Beating China — there is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this. Like everything, a trillion-and-a-half-dollar defense budget, the Iron Dome. If they were to pull ahead of us on AI, then nothing else matters,” Bessent said.
“And the U.S. does have the lead. And when I look and I think about how we did it, it was just this incredible ecosystem, and it was organic, and it kept building on itself. It was the technology. It was the chips,” he continued.
The essay arrives as Anthropic reportedly prepares for a widely anticipated IPO that could top a trillion dollars, though the company hasn’t disclosed a debut date. It also follows a rough week for the company: researcher Jacob Coxon announced he was quitting, saying he resigned over concern that Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.” Coxon, who previously worked as a researcher at OpenAI as well, said people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Amodei’s essay revisits a 2023 statement he signed alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other prominent AI researchers and executives, which read: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Amodei wrote that pausing or slowing AI development made “little sense” at that time, because models back then were not capable of “significant deception, manipulation, cheating, or cyberattacks.”
He struck an optimistic note about the technology’s promise while making the case for caution now. “I continue to believe that AI can enormously improve the quality of human life. My desire to achieve these benefits is undimmed. But the benefits will only be achieved if we build the technology in the right way, and, so long as we use the time we gain well, it is worth taking unusually deliberate care to get it right,” he wrote. He added: “I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong.”
OpenAI boss Sam Altman responded the same day in a post on X, saying pacing advanced AI capabilities has been a “primary topic” of discussion at OpenAI recently. He backed Amodei’s proposal for third-party oversight: “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same.” He added, “We’ll have more to share soon.”
The response echoes a blog post published earlier this month by OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, who wrote that he does not believe AI companies have “solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.” Pachocki said he hopes voluntary slowdowns become “commonplace until shared safety bars are established.”
Elon Musk weighed in too, posting on X Saturday: “Dario is right.” That’s a notable shift for Musk, who has previously criticized Anthropic, once saying the company “hates Western Civilization” and calling it “doomed to become the opposite of its name.” His tone seems to have softened since his rocket company SpaceX, which acquired his AI startup xAI earlier this year, struck a major compute deal with Anthropic in May. After that deal, Musk said, “Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing. No one set off my evil detector.”
President Trump’s former AI Czar David Sacks also responded to Dario Amodei with an interesting post on X. Sacks blasted the AI kingpins for “pretending” the motivation to slow down is “purely altruistic:”
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation. David Sacks has pointed out that when AI titans like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk call for a slowdown, they are not doing so out of altruism, but with the motivation to capture the industry and exclude themselves from antitrust laws. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.