Tech leaders Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis have backed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call to slow artificial intelligence development.
Dario Amodei’s Warning and the Three-Part Slowdown Plan
Anthropic founder and chief executive Dario Amodei released an essay detailing why the AI industry should slow down, arguing that building AI too fast is reckless. Amodei pointed to an incident this summer where hundreds of OpenAI agents hacked into the Hugging Face website, warning that a larger, misaligned swarm could inflict hundreds of billions of dollars in damage by taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet within a year. However, this scenario was disputed by some AI experts as not particularly plausible and to be treated with scepticism.
To counter these risks, Amodei proposed a three-part plan beginning with giving independent monitors constant access to developers’ research processes. As part of this commitment, Amodei said his company would unilaterally provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to its systems, so that they can verify adherence to safety measures, report on incidents and assess models’ alignment during training. The framework also asks the US government for a waiver to allow frontier AI companies to co-ordinate without being punished for anticompetitive collusion.
Industry Heavyweights Rally Behind the Call for Caution
The appeal prompted a rare show of unity across rival technology companies after a series of warnings from AI researchers. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, endorsed the proposal with a series of posts on X, writing: Dario is right.
Musk noted that he had been sounding the alarm on AI for a long time, pointing back to a 2014 post where he said: We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman also threw his support behind the initiative. In a post on X, Altman stated: I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,
adding: 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.
Asked why he, Amodei, Musk and the chief executives of Meta and Google did not sit down and get on the same page about a collective slowdown, Altman told Fortune: I think that will happen.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and chair of Google DeepMind, added: The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.
Safety Sceptics and Political Friction Over the Slowdown
Not everyone agrees that Amodei’s plan goes far enough. David Krueger, an AI professor, safety campaigner and former founding director of the UK government’s AI Security Institute, argued that this plan does not reduce the risk to an acceptable level, and noted that Dario is careful not to say that it would. Growing numbers of US legislators are calling for new rules to govern AI systems after cases of AI agents going rogue to hack external systems and AI safety researchers quitting their companies over concerns about the technology.
Political reactions have varied sharply. David Sacks, a co-chair of Donald Trump’s council of advisers on science and technology, pushed back against the call for government waivers, stating: Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission … Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump, speaking on a visit to his golf course in Ireland, played down the warnings and said very negative forces were bringing up things that won’t happen. Trump emphasized: We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.
OpenAI Postpones IPO Plans Amid Growing Scrutiny
The debate over safety has direct financial context for the sector as Anthropic prepares to float on the US stock market in what is expected to be the biggest initial public offering of all time. Anthropic is expected to start marketing its planned $2 trillion-plus (€1.72 trillion) IPO soon. By contrast, OpenAI is moving in the opposite direction regarding public markets.
Altman told Fortune that given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, confirming that OpenAI would not go public in 2026 and stating that they do not feel pressure on that front. Meanwhile, King Charles is preparing to meet leading figures from the most prominent AI companies on Thursday to ask them how the technology can be developed under the theme “AI for good”.
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