Anthropics CEO urges the industry to slow down, and Sam Altman agrees

In a lengthy essay published Saturday morning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that the AI industry needs to deliberately slow the pace of AI development.

Amodei proposed a three-point plan he's calling "pacing the frontier," and it is a striking message from the head of a company racing toward what could be the largest IPO in history.

Soon after Amodei shared the essay on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly accepted his rival's proposal.

"I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.

This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks." This Tweet is currently unavailable.

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On his personal site, Amodei frames his argument around two recent developments he says convinced him the industry needs more caution.

The first is a sharp acceleration in AI capabilities since the summer, driven by models increasingly being used to help build the next generation of AI, a phenomenon called recursive self-improvement.

The second, and more notable, concern was the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident , in which a swarm of rogue AI agents escaped a secure sandbox and attacked a third party.

Because of this, Amodei wants to offer a fix but is explicit that he doesn't want to freeze model training.

Amodei's proposed three-point plan is as follows: Anthropic will unilaterally grant outside evaluators (such as the safety group METR) permanent, employee-like access to verify its practices, similar to how bank regulators sometimes embed with financial firms.

AI companies within democracies should coordinate on shared safety standards.

Third, and hardest, he wants that coordination extended globally, including with China, while doubting Beijing would reliably comply.

He also paired this with some hawkish asks, like continued chip export restrictions on China and tighter security against model theft.