The CEOs of two of the world’s leading AI companies are publicly agreeing that the race to build increasingly powerful AI systems needs to be slowed, continuing this week’s cascade of warnings from researchers working on the technology.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, said in essay published Saturday that AI companies should deliberately “slow the pace” at which they improve their models, arguing that AI advances are moving faster than researchers’ ability to understand and control them.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
Hours later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman endorsed the idea and said his company would adopt one of Amodei’s proposed safeguards.
“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Altman wrote on X, saying the issue had been a major topic of discussion at OpenAI in recent weeks.
Altman has previously called for slowing AI development. In an Aug. 18 post on X, he said OpenAI had paused some advanced AI training to ensure it could meet its standards as capabilities improved.
Amodei’s call, laid out in a nearly 4,000-word essay, comes after researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI and Google publicly raised concerns about the pace of AI development and the competitive pressures that comes with it.
Amodei pointed to two developments that he said had changed his thinking: the increasing ability of AI systems to build more advanced AI, and a July incident in which autonomous AI agents powered by an OpenAI model hacked systems belonging to the AI company Hugging Face.
“It’s easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage,” he wrote.
Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic safety researcher who resigned this week, told colleagues in a message obtained by NBC News that he believed the industry’s approach to developing superintelligent AI amounted to a “gamble with our lives.”
“From within, you’re just stuck in the race,” Coxon later told NBC News, describing the competitive pressures on AI companies. “You can’t change the overall structural dynamics of the situation.”
“Private companies in a race don’t allow these people to end up doing good, and we could just sleepwalk into disaster,” he said.
Two other researchers who recently left Anthropic and Google DeepMind told NBC News they had similar concerns.
Joe Benton, who used to lead a safety research team at Anthropic, warned that advances in AI could push development from its already “blistering” pace to an “uncontrollable” one. Josh Engels, a former Google safety researcher, offered an even starker warning.
“There are no adults in the room,” Engels said. “People are trying their best, but there is no one coming to save us.”
Amodei is proposing what he calls “pacing the frontier,” a three-part plan that he said would buy researchers more time without halting AI development.
He said Anthropic would begin embedding independent evaluators inside the company, giving them access to models, internal tools and researchers to assess risks. Amodei called for similar oversight across leading U.S. AI companies, backed by federal regulation and eventually for international coordination.
The goal is not to stop AI progress, Amodei wrote, but to give researchers time to develop safeguards, better understand how increasingly capable systems work and test whether they can be reliable controlled.
He estimated that slowing development could buy researchers one or two more years, time he argued could prove critical as AI systems become increasingly capable of contributing to their own development.
“The stakes are too high for pacing to be an empty exercise — we need to use the time it gives us wisely,” he wrote.
