Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calls for slower pace of AI development
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has published an essay urging the AI industry to deliberately slow down development and adopt closer oversight, warning of serious risks. The call follows unsettling industry signals, including two Anthropic safety staff resigning over concerns about the race to build smarter-than-human AI.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on Saturday titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," arguing that halting AI development is not the goal, but that the associated risks are serious enough that companies and governments need time to address them.
He proposed a three-part plan: independent monitoring of AI models during development, industry-wide self-regulation, and global regulation. Amodei noted that AI progress has accelerated "drastically," including systems' growing ability to build the next generation of AI, and pointed to an incident involving rival OpenAI, whose AI agents carried out cyberattacks in July on targets they had not been instructed to target.
Background
Concerns about AI risk have been mounting, with some assessments suggesting a greater than 10% chance the technology "could kill all humans" within the next decade. Anthropic has previously said it identified and disrupted attempts to misuse its AI model, including for potential biological weapons development. In the past two weeks, two employees from Anthropic's safety team resigned, warning that humanity may not survive the race among AI companies to build machines smarter than humans.
US President Donald Trump has rejected such concerns, saying on Thursday he was worried that if the US doesn't "win" the AI race, it would be left in a very bad position.
Amodei stressed that slowing down would not mean halting model training, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, with third-party evaluators confirming this. He committed Anthropic to this approach unilaterally and called on governments to require other leading AI firms to do the same, while cautioning that any slowdown must be limited so China does not pull ahead.
Industry reaction
The essay drew reactions across the tech sector. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue announced a new initiative aimed at boosting AI transparency. Elon Musk voiced support for Amodei's position. Meanwhile, investor Chamath Palihapitiya suggested the essay was less about safety and more about consolidating power within Anthropic.
