Like a situationship that “just isn’t into labels,” the largest AI companies are now saying they’d prefer to take things a bit slower.
What happened: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an open letter over the weekend calling for a global slowdown in the pace of AI development — and committed Anthropic to doing so unilaterally.
Amodei warned that this summer saw AI “advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI,” and that this created a risk of AI outrunning “our ability to understand and control these systems.”
He also committed to giving third-party evaluators “permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.”
Zoom out: Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceXAI, both chimed in to second Amodei’s call for slower AI development. Altman said OpenAI would also provide independent evaluators with similar access to their systems.
Altman also said he would push back OpenAI’s planned IPO to at least 2027, calling it “an ill-advised moment” to go public.
Why it matters: It’s the first public commitment by the largest AI companies to coordinate a slower pace of AI development in order to address the dangers posed by their own systems.
Even though many in the industry had expressed concerns about how advanced AI systems were becoming, the competitive dynamics between the companies building the technology was seen as a major obstacle to any meaningful slowdown.
Yes, but: Some have suggested the push is less motivated by safety concerns than, as White House AI chief David Sacks put it, a “bid for regulatory capture.”
Our take: For better or worse, the U.S. government seems uninterested in regulating AI. Barring that changing, or research hitting an unexpected technological wall, this is probably the only short-term path to hitting the brakes on the deployment of more powerful AI systems.—TS
