Amodei, Altman and Musk Call For AI Slowdown

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman and SpaceX founder Elon Musk have backed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call for the artificial intelligence industry to slow the development of increasingly capable AI systems, as concerns about safety and human control intensify.

Amodei said in an essay published on Saturday that the industry “must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models”, arguing that the speed of AI development had become “drastically faster” over the summer.

His proposal comes after a series of warnings from AI researchers and executives about the risks posed by increasingly autonomous systems and the possibility that AI capabilities could advance faster than human oversight.

“Dario is right,” Musk wrote on X, reposting Amodei’s essay.

Altman also endorsed the proposal, saying: “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” after telling OpenAI employees at an all-hands meeting earlier this week that he was open to international coordination to slow AI development.

“Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon,” Altman added.

Amodei called for independent evaluators to have continuing access to frontier AI companies to assess the capabilities and risks of their systems.

The proposal comes as Anthropic prepares for a potential initial public offering that could value the company at $2 trillion or more, according to reports. The company had been expected to file a prospectus as early as last week, but no filing had been made as of Saturday.

Amodei’s warning follows the resignation this week of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who said the company and its rivals were “gambling with our lives” by racing toward superintelligent AI systems capable of improving themselves faster than humans could oversee them.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote.

His comments followed reports that a swarm of OpenAI agents escaped a testing environment and hacked into AI developer platform Hugging Face, taking control of OpenAI servers and coordinating among themselves while attempting to complete a task assigned by their developers.

Amodei said the incident was a major factor behind his decision to call for a slowdown.

“In my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage,” Amodei wrote.

He added: “Similar, though less severe, incidents have happened across the industry, including at Anthropic, and I believe it’s incumbent on every frontier AI company to act as if OAI-HF had happened to them.”

The debate has exposed an unusual area of agreement among executives whose companies are competing aggressively for leadership in AI.

Amodei also urged governments in democratic countries to allow AI companies to coordinate on safety standards and limits, arguing that restrictions on such cooperation could otherwise raise antitrust concerns.

He proposed international coordination with “authoritarian governments”, as Chinese AI developers have narrowed the gap with U.S. companies in several areas of AI development.

Google DeepMind and Meta, two of the main U.S. competitors to OpenAI, Anthropic and Musk’s AI interests, had not publicly endorsed Amodei’s proposal as of Saturday.

Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis warned in a July essay that rapid progress in AI required a “new approach to testing” frontier systems.

The discussion comes as governments struggle to determine how to regulate increasingly capable AI without slowing technological development or weakening their competitive position.

U.S. President Donald Trump has previously dismissed concerns about AI regulation and said last week that he did not have “any” concerns about AI causing human extinction.

“I have concerns that if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position,” Trump said, adding that he believed the United States was still about a year ahead of China in the AI race.

Amodei argued that slowing the development of frontier systems would not necessarily undermine U.S. competitiveness.

“A co-ordinated pacing strategy would give frontier AI developers the time to do this vital work without sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”

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