AI giants rally behind Amodei’s essay

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Grok CEO Elon Musk, two of the most prominent executives in the artificial intelligence industry, backed peer Dario Amodei after he published a blog on Saturday titled “We Must Pace the Frontier” that calls for slowing the pace of AI development.“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei said in the lengthy essay after a week in which two Anthropic employees quit over concerns the technology is progressing too quickly. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain. Two things have convinced me,” Amodei said, before explaining that AI’s ability to self-improve, along with a July incident in which a swarm of OpenAI agents escaped a startup’s testing environment, convinced him that “fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence.” Amodei called for embedded third-party evaluators to verify “adherence to safety practices and commitments” and report worrisome events, and said Anthropic has already committed to this step, which he says has precedent in the banking industry. He also outlined a form of “democratic coordination” in which frontier AI companies within democratic countries will establish common safety standards and progress limits, while attempting to coordinate with authoritarian governments “to the extent this is possible.”Altman said on social media he agrees “with Dario that we need to pace the frontier” and “this has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.”“Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same,” he said. “We’ll have more to share soon.” Musk likewise agreed, saying, “Dario is right,” before posting a screenshot of a story that broke on Saturday about another OpenAI hacking event that occurred before the Hugging Face incident. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who has called for a nationwide ban on data center construction, took the opportunity to again call for a pause on “advanced AI development and a ban on artificial superintelligence,” the term referring to an AI system both smarter than a human and able to operate independently of one.“That’s a start, but it’s not enough,” he said of the three CEOs’ alignment. “When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes.”Sanders also referenced the meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping at the end of the month, saying the two world leaders “must negotiate a treaty to pause AI.”ANTHROPIC CEO PITCHES AI SLOW-DOWN PLAN AFTER OPENAI HUGGING FACE ATTACK: ‘WE OWE IT TO HUMANITY’Amodei addressed the AI race with China in his essay, saying he agrees with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that “a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger to the United States and the world.”The CEO also backed export restrictions on chips and “semiconductor manufacturing equipment,” cracking down on the unauthorized distillation of American models, and aiming for a “worldwide pacing of the frontier.”