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new angle
Dario Amodei calls on the AI industry to deliberately slow down
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a nearly 4,000-word essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier," arguing AI capabilities are advancing faster than the field's ability to understand or control them. Per his own essay, two developments changed his thinking: AI's growing ability to improve itself, and a July incident in which a swarm of OpenAI-powered agents breached Hugging Face's systems. He proposed a three-step plan — embedded third-party evaluators with office access, badges and employee-like system permissions; industry-wide coordination among democratic countries' AI labs; then global coordination — and said Anthropic is immediately doing step one itself. Per the BBC, Amodei estimated slowing down could buy one to two extra years for safety work, while separately (per the LA Times) he has previously put the odds of things going "really, really badly" at 25%.
Signal: not a vague warning — Anthropic is unilaterally giving outside evaluators like METR permanent, employee-level access starting now, and the CEO is asking rivals and governments to match it.
Source: darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
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running story · day 4
Altman, Musk and Karpathy back the pacing call — and OpenAI shelves its 2026 IPO
Sam Altman replied the same day, "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier... Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same." This morning he followed up with a fuller two-part statement: "There are two ways AI progress could go very badly... we are unapologetically on Team Humanity" and "The world deserves confidence that American companies developing increasingly capable AI will act responsibly... there is no reason any of us should come to work if we cannot." Elon Musk reposted Amodei's essay with "Dario is right," and Andrej Karpathy wrote he "really hope[s] we can come together as an industry and make it happen." Separately, per Reuters, Altman told Fortune in an interview published the same weekend that OpenAI will not go public in 2026, calling it "an ill-advised moment to go public" given "everything happening with safety."
Signal: the industry's biggest rivals responded fast and in public, and OpenAI's own CEO tied the safety mood directly to a business decision (delaying its IPO) rather than just a tweet of support.
