Dario Amodei is asking the industry to tap the brakes at the frontier. In an essay published Saturday, he urged companies to slow the rate at which they improve their most advanced models, following fresh warnings from researchers about the technology's potential for catastrophic harm. On CBS News' Sunday Morning, he described the "toughest dilemma" as the scenario in which adversarial nations - namely China - refuse to slow down.
His essay proposes three measures to decelerate progress while preserving competitive benefits and maintaining the United States' lead. First, he said Anthropic has "unilaterally" opened its doors to third-party evaluators with employee-level access so they can verify safety practices and report incidents. Second, he calls on leading AI firms in democratic countries to coordinate on shared safety standards. Third, he urges coordination between democratic and authoritarian governments.
This lands as AI companies face backlash over data centers and mounting calls from Washington for regulation. Inside Anthropic, researcher Jacob Coxon said he quit, arguing that both the company and rival OpenAI are "gambling with our lives."
Support poured in across the industry. OpenAI's Sam Altman posted that he agrees it's necessary to "pace the frontier." He also told Fortune, "Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public," and said the company is unlikely to go public this year, in part due to safety concerns. Despite strained ties since Amodei left OpenAI to start Anthropic, both companies are preparing for potentially historic IPOs, though neither has set a date.
Regulatory disclosures show Anthropic will remit $1.25 billion per month to SpaceX through May 2029.
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Investor David Sacks, a vocal Anthropic critic and former Trump AI and crypto czar, said he backs their "decision to be responsible" provided that OpenAI and Anthropic are convinced their models are "scary enough" to justify easing off the accelerator. He argued they face "massive product-liability exposure" if their products enable something like a damaging cyberattack, so trading power for reliability and predictability is simply good business. "So go ahead and pace the frontier," he wrote. "You are the ones setting it." He added, "So just do it."
Meta's AI chief, Alexandr Wang, who joined after his startup, Scale AI, secured a $14 billion investment last year, has not directly addressed Amodei's essay. He wrote that Meta Superintelligence Labs is "rapidly scaling up the share of our efforts that goes into alignment as our models become more powerful," and, "We do believe alignment can be the gating factor for scaling as we get closer to the frontier."
In recent months, Chinese AI firms have closed the gap with top products from American players such as OpenAI and Anthropic, prompting unease among Silicon Valley experts and lawmakers. On Sunday, at the BRICS summit in India, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a "consensus-based global AI governance framework" and said China would take part in building a BRICS AI open-source community. The bloc's first summit took place in 2009, and BRICS today counts 11 members, among them China, India, Russia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is scheduled to sit down with Xi at the White House on Sept. 24, and AI is expected to feature in the talks. That is the bind Amodei flagged: the lure of military and commercial advantage makes restraint difficult if key rivals do not slow down.
Two pressures are pulling in opposite directions. On one side, Chinese players are stepping up, and U.S. leaders want to hold their edge. On the other, top names are talking about pacing the frontier with peer review, shared standards, and more outside scrutiny, while legal and political risks get louder.
For your money, the real tell will be actions, not posts. If frontier upgrades genuinely slow and third-party access deepens, product timelines could lengthen, but stability and predictability may improve. And watch policy signals: BRICS is pushing governance, and a White House meeting on Sept. 24 puts AI in the diplomatic spotlight.
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