A Saturday-morning essay from Dario Amodei was all it took for the president of the United States to be typing in all caps about it by Monday.
The Anthropic CEO called the piece “We Must Pace the Frontier,” and in it he argued the case for easing off the throttle on AI development. The days that followed saw AI leaders and politicians picking sides — and the dividing line runs in a direction few would have predicted.
The argument is narrower than the uproar around it
Amodei sketched out three steps for pacing AI development. The first: embedded third-party evaluators able to verify that a company is sticking to its safety practices and commitments, and to report incidents. The second: coordination among frontier AI companies based in democratic countries on standards and limits. The third: global coordination between democratic and authoritarian governments on pacing AI development “to the extent this is possible.”
On that first step, Amodei said Anthropic is “unilaterally committing to the first of these steps.”
Look closely at the wording, though, and the request gets smaller. Pacing “does not mean halting model training or technical progress, ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this,” Amodei said.
OpenAI signed up quicker than anyone predicted
Not long after Amodei posted about the essay on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman weighed in. “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” he said. “This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.” Altman said his company would bring in independent evaluators as well, describing the proposal as a “great idea.”
By Sunday he had pushed the point further, saying OpenAI welcomes “a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI.” He added that the company hopes others “learn from our approaches and propose their own; we think shared standards for misalignment, monitoring, and safety will lead to better outcomes.”
His caveat mirrored Amodei’s almost exactly. “When we talk about “pacing”, we do not mean “stopping”,” Altman said, though he noted progress should be “slower than it otherwise could be.”
He also spelled out two scenarios in which he believes AI progress “could go very badly”: losing “control of the future to AI,” and arriving “in a world with too much concentration of power.” Both, he said, can be sidestepped by “walking a narrow middle path.”
A single sentence each from Hassabis and Musk
Replying to the essay, Google DeepMind co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis said: “Dario’s essay points towards the right path forward.” He added that “The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment,” and referred back to a framework for an AI standards body that he published in July.
Elon Musk, the SpaceX CEO, kept it even shorter, reposting the essay with the words: “Dario is right.”
And then Trump weighed in
A meandering Monday-morning Truth Social post saw the president reject the notion of slowing AI down:
“The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades! The Trump Administration has stopped AI “people” from doing bad, or potentially bad, “things,” like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a “perfect little angel” – and we will continue to do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Washington’s doubts are about motive, not safety
Vice President JD Vance left the safety argument alone entirely. His question was why the companies are asking for rules in the first place.
He called it a “little bit weird” that frontier AI tech companies are “kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them,” and said it “feels a little bit to me like a bit of a trojan horse.” Vance cited the president’s remark that “we know the Chinese are engaged in this long term AI race against the United States.”
That reaction is the giveaway. Once both of the largest labs request a federal framework over the same weekend, the lawmakers who would have to draft it begin asking whose competitors those rules would shut out.
The House Speaker says the meeting could happen tomorrow
Speaking to Jake Tapper on CNN on Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson said that “I think the leaders and the providers of all these platforms… They need to come together in a meeting with us and sit down and figure out what the right balance is. We cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us. And that’s the challenge. It’s national security balanced with the immediate security of making sure the models are safe.”
Whether such a meeting takes place, and when, remains unknown. Johnson’s own answer was “tomorrow.”
The week’s most unlikely pairing
Senator Bernie Sanders said he finds himself in agreement with Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist who once wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan, over an article she published under the title “Pause AI for Humanity’s Sake.”
So a democratic socialist senator and a former Reagan speechwriter have arrived at the same conclusion, while the chief executives of the two leading labs request regulation and the White House refuses to give it to them. Whatever coalition eventually forms here, party lines are not going to describe it.