AI Leaders Split Over Pace of Development as Safety Calls Grow

AI industry leaders remain divided over how quickly companies should push forward with increasingly powerful technology, with some calling for a coordinated slowdown and others favouring market-led safeguards.

Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, in an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier", said AI progress had accelerated "drastically faster" since summer 2026, driven mainly by the technology's growing ability to build the next generation of AI. He pointed to the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, in which an AI "swarm" carried out cybersecurity attacks, as a pivotal moment showing the potential for "catastrophic damage" if capabilities grow without guardrails. Amodei proposed a three-step plan: stronger safety testing and independent evaluations of advanced models, coordination among leading AI companies, and international cooperation.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman endorsed the approach, saying he agreed on the need to pace the frontier and that it had been a primary topic of recent discussions at his company. He said OpenAI intends to adopt Anthropic's proposal of giving independent evaluators employee-like access. Altman had flagged the risks well before the current boom, writing in a 2015 essay that the development of superhuman machine intelligence was probably the greatest threat to humanity's continued existence.

SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk also backed Amodei, saying on X that "Dario is right". Musk had supported a 2023 push by the non-profit Future of Life Institute to halt AI development for six months to allow time for safety guardrails, and was among researchers who signed a 2015 open letter advocating a global ban on offensive autonomous weapons.

Meta Platforms chief executive Mark Zuckerberg appeared to break from the calls for a coordinated slowdown, saying competition and liability give AI companies enough reason to act individually on safety. Every lab, he said, has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said no government in the world is ready for the changes AI will bring to society. Long optimistic about the technology's health applications, he has recently warned of threats to jobs, concerns about attacks, and the dangers of addiction to AI companions, and has called for an international organisation to manage the technology. His foundation plans to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on expanding access to AI.

Alphabet chief scientist Demis Hassabis said Amodei's essay pointed towards the right path forward, adding that the details needed to be worked through. Google announced last month that Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, would take the newly created title of Alphabet's chief scientist and transition from DeepMind chief executive to its chairman.

Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder now at Anthropic, said he hoped the industry could come together to make the plan happen. Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI, played a key role in developing Tesla's self-driving and AI technology before leaving the company in 2022, and joined Anthropic in May.

Governments are taking differing positions. US President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that the only control or guardrails AI needs is a strong and smart president, adding that China would benefit from doubt being cast on AI development. A Senate aide and a lobbyist familiar with the matter said Senate negotiators were debating legislation that would require AI companies to demonstrate they are taking reasonable precautions to keep their tools from causing harm.

China's state-backed Global Times said in an editorial that the true agenda of Amodei's essay was to curb China's AI development through technological barriers and regulatory monopolies, uphold Washington's monopolistic hegemony in cutting-edge technology, and exclude China from the global AI governance system. China's state security minister, Chen Yixin, wrote in a government outlet that advanced US models such as Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber could pose serious risks to China's critical information infrastructure, and called for a comprehensive strengthening of AI security.

In Europe, a European Commission spokesperson, Thomas Regnier, said the European Union favours developing innovation in artificial intelligence but companies have to prove their services are safe for citizens to operate in the bloc. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde warned the EU faced an unprecedented risk of being cut off from AI, saying Europe needed to become a producer of AI technology to preserve its autonomy.

Germany's digital affairs ministry said halting AI development was not a viable option for Europe, adding that strengthening Europe's digital sovereignty required further development and innovation. Berlin said it was monitoring global AI developments very closely and took public warnings from leading developers seriously.

Spain's Digital Transformation Minister, Oscar Lopez, said there was growing discussion about the need for an international agreement to manage AI risks, likening some proposals to nuclear non-proliferation agreements.