These three kings of AI have a plan. It could blow everything up

Could the US artificial intelligence industry heed the call from the leaders of three of its leading companies to slow development of AI? The problem for them, the rest of the sector and financial markets is that the entire AI ecosystem might be damned if it did.

In the face of dramatic warnings that AI could wipe out humankind within a decade if development were left unchecked, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wrote an essay warning that AI itself was now building its next generation of models, with capabilities that could soon be beyond the ability of human’s to understand or control their own creations.

He mapped out a plan to “pace” and slow AI development in a call that was joined by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceX’s Elon Musk.

That unusual consensus from the CEOs of three of the leading develops of frontier AI levels – interestingly, a consensus not yet joined by their hyperscaler counterparts like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon – may well be genuine.

There have been enough recent “events” – AI agents escaping their “sandboxes” or supposedly secure testing environments – and enough warnings from AI researchers to suggest that, with AI models now starting to train themselves, we are on the cusp of a new and potentially more threatening phase of AI development.

Would slowing the pace of development and developing guardrails around AI deployment lessen that threat? Would all AI developers stop developing? Would Chinese or Russian developers join the moratorium? Unlikely.

More to the point, AI, its finances and the infrastructure being built to support it, is dependent on continued innovation and growth. If it loses momentum it risks implosion.

That might well be the case, and perhaps, for those who view these things cynically, even the motivation for those at the bleeding edge of AI development – fierce competitors for both technological leadership and capital – to suddenly be on the same page.

Unlike Alphabet’s Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX don’t have their vast legacy cashflows to help fund their businesses.