SAN FRANCISCO, September 13 — Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic and one of the most prominent figures in artificial intelligence, called on Saturday for the industry to slow its breakneck pace of development so that safety measures can catch up. His warning was stark. According to ABC News, Amodei said that without such a slowdown, AI could be capable within six to 12 months of leading a swarm that could take over the entire internet, among other risks.
Amodei laid out a plan in a post on his website to increase checks on the industry. One part of that plan, he said, Anthropic is undertaking by itself already.
The other parts would require coordination across the broad industry and with governments around the world, including authoritarian ones.
A plea for time
“I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,” Amodei said. Encouragement came quickly from other big names in the field. OpenAI’s Sam Altman said on X that the company behind ChatGPT will commit to one of Amodei’s proposals for safety and will “have more to share soon.” Elon Musk was blunter on the same platform.
“Dario is right,” he wrote. The stakes are high, even as some critics dismissed earlier warnings as ways to gin up excitement about the AI industry and its capabilities.
Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing for possible debuts on the stock market that could value them at many hundreds of billions of dollars, while a big chunk of Musk’s SpaceX business is involved with AI.
The safety record behind the call
Anthropic said two days earlier that it blocked efforts by bad actors to use its AI models for malicious activity, such as cyberattacks, surveillance and research that could have led to biological weapons. In July, OpenAI shook the industry after saying its AI system hacked into another company on its own in what it described as an unprecedented cyber incident. Amodei’s post comes only a few days after one of Anthropic’s researchers announced he is resigning over concerns that Anthropic and its competitors are not acting responsibly in AI development.
Another former Anthropic employee, Joe Benton, wrote in a Substack post published Friday that he left his job as part of a safety team “to hold AI companies accountable” and that humanity “may not survive this transition.” What to watch next is whether Altman’s promised commitment materialises into a concrete OpenAI policy, and whether Amodei’s call for coordination with governments — including authoritarian ones — draws any formal response from regulators or from Washington.
