The end is nigh, and the shares go on sale in October

What an interesting weekend in AI-land that was. Dario Amodei wants the industry to slow down the development of frontier AI models. Anthropic’s CEO published an essay on Saturday calling for a cap on how fast the capabilities of frontier AI models improve, and within hours Sam Altman and Elon Musk had endorsed it. How convenient!

Amodei also wants tighter US chip export controls on China, and a crackdown on what he alleges is model distillation by Chinese labs. Hold that second part in mind for a moment.

Anthropic is expected to begin marketing its initial public offering in mid-October and to list days before the US midterm elections in November, people familiar with the plans have told Reuters.

The Financial Times reported on Sunday that the company has told shareholders its adjusted operating income will be positive for a second consecutive quarter, on gross margins above 80% before revenue shared with distribution partners and the cost of training its models.

Extinction warnings for the public, 80% margins for the shareholders and a listing in between.

I am not going to argue that Amodei is lying about the risks. I don’t know, and neither does any other journalist writing about this. The argument I want to make is narrower: that the remedy on offer would raise rivals’ costs and the people offering it have hundreds of billions of dollars riding on the outcome.

A safety case, on its own terms, does not require export controls, which is presumably what Amodei is after. If the danger is that models are improving faster than anyone can control them, that danger is indifferent to where the model was trained.

Amodei’s remedy comes with measures that would constrain the cheapest and fastest-improving competition the American labs face – open-weight models, many of them Chinese, distributed free or at low cost and undercutting the per-token economics needed to justify the hundreds of billions of dollars of data centre investment in the US. When the safety fix and the competitive fix turn out to be the same fix, a sceptic is entitled to ask questions.

Then there’s the inconsistency. Altman told Fortune that OpenAI will not list in 2026, saying that given everything happening with safety it would be an ill-advised moment to go public. He said a 10% chance of AI-driven extinction would be intolerable and that the industry cannot let egos or profit incentives get in the way. Anthropic, whose own former researchers issued the warnings that started this, has not moved its listing. Both men endorsed the same slowdown; only one of them is paying for it.

Altman also suggested the leading labs may be close to a pact to slow development and jointly manage safety risks. Consider what that would be in any other industry: the dominant producers agreeing among themselves to limit output. That sounds like textbook collusion.

Donald Trump, of all people, arrived at roughly the right conclusion on Sunday, though by entirely the wrong route. Asked at his Irish golf course whether AI should slow down or face more regulation, the US president said: “We’re leading China in AI.