Anthropic CEO calls for AI race to slow down. Musk and OpenAI's Altman agrees

The executives racing to build the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) systems are starting to agree on something that would have sounded extraordinary only a few years ago: the race needs to slow down.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Claude’s developer, Anthropic, on Saturday called for companies to deliberately pace advances in frontier AI, arguing that model capabilities were improving faster than researchers’ ability to understand and control them.

In an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier”, Amodei said advances since this summer had convinced him that AI safety work was no longer keeping pace with rapidly improving capabilities.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote.

However, he didn’t call for an outright halt, arguing for slowing down the pace of the development. “Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers, while building it too fast is reckless.”

Two other prominent leaders of rival giant AI and tech companies quickly backed the idea.

OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, said, “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” to give society time to adapt to increasingly powerful systems. Elon Musk, whose firm xAI has developed Grok, also publicly backed Amodei’s latest proposal, responding that “Dario is right.”

That puts three of the AI industry’s most prominent and fiercely competitive figures behind versions of the same idea: frontier AI — the most capable, cutting-edge AI models — should continue advancing, but not necessarily as fast as technically possible.

A warning shot

Amodei’s warning comes as researchers within the companies themselves become increasingly alarmed about a potentially critical threshold: AI systems beginning to automate the work required to develop more capable AI systems.

Jacob Coxon, a researcher who worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI, resigned from Anthropic this month and accused the companies of “racing straight to self-improving super-intelligence and gambling with our lives.” He also said that "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

While Amodei didn’t go as far as Coxon, Amodei’s essay raised several of the same concerns.

He said that this “recursive self-improvement,” in which AI is increasingly helping researchers build the next generation of AI, was beginning to emerge across the industry and could accelerate development faster than humans could safely monitor.