What smart people are saying about the AI apocalypse and calls to slow everything down

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei agreed this week to put third-party safety monitors in their companies.

Getty Images AI leaders are rallying around calls to slow frontier AI development over mounting safety fears.

Dario Amodei warned that AI swarms could take over the internet within a year.

Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Demis Hassabis backed Amodei's push for greater safeguards.

It took the possibility of species annihilation , but AI leaders did something remarkable this weekend: They reached a consensus.

After ex-Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon's warnings about a looming AI armageddon lit a firestorm among techies and politicians alike, the leaders of the most advanced AI labs came to a tentative agreement — largely via posts on X — that some sort of slowdown is necessary to save humanity.

While they were largely short on details regarding the mechanics of such a thing, and notable China has not weighed in, the American AI industry has reached an inflection point that could impact everything from your phone's chatbot to global politics.

"The stakes are too high for pacing to be an empty exercise — we need to use the time it gives us wisely," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in an essay entitled "We must pace the frontier," which was published Saturday.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman , who has made similar calls in the past, agreed in an X post later that day.

So did Elon Musk.

Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis also offered his support for Amodei's proposals.

Here's a look at what smart people are saying about the AI apocalypse and the methods the leaders of the leading AI labs say are necessary to stop it.

David Sacks, a presidential advisor on science and tech David Sacks, former White House AI czar, expressed some skepticism over Anthropic's mythos warnings.

Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Images The Trump administration has repeatedly signaled disinterest in regulating AI development as it seeks to keep pace with China.