The proposal to slow artificial intelligence development faces its hardest test in China, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Sunday, warning that adversarial nations may refuse to follow suit.
“The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of AI progress,” Amodei told CBS News’ “Sunday Morning.” He said the incentives to pull ahead and the military advantage that comes with it are so large that coordination would be “very difficult,” adding, “I don’t know if it’s possible, but we should try.”
The remarks followed an essay Amodei published on Saturday urging AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models. The essay laid out a three-step plan aimed at slowing development without sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.
Anthropic has unilaterally committed to the first step, which grants third-party evaluators employee-level access to verify safety practices and report incidents. The second step encourages leading AI firms within democratic countries to coordinate common safety standards. The third calls for coordination between democratic and authoritarian governments.
Several industry figures backed the proposal. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose company Amodei left to found Anthropic, wrote on X that he agrees on the need to “pace the frontier.” Demis Hassabis, chair of Google DeepMind, wrote that the essay “points towards the right path forward” and that “the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.”
Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, also voiced support. “Dario is right that there should be some oversight,” he wrote early Sunday. “Peer review of AI by competitors is the right way to start this off.” Musk had been a critic of Anthropic until SpaceX signed a compute deal with the company in May. Under that deal, Anthropic will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029.
The essay landed as the AI sector faces public backlash over its data centers and calls for regulation from Washington. An Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, said he quit over concerns that the company and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Saturday in an interview with Fortune that the company will likely not go public this year. “Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public,” he said, citing concerns around safety.
David Sacks, who previously served as President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar and is a critic of Anthropic, wrote that if the two firms truly believe their models are “scary enough” to warrant a slowdown, he supports their decision. He said both companies need to “stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission.”