Amodei Urges Slower AI Race, Drawing Rare Backing From Musk and Altman

Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has called for a slowdown in the pace of advanced artificial intelligence development, drawing unusual support from two of the industry's most prominent figures and reigniting a debate over so-called AI doomerism.

In an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier", Amodei argued that AI progress has accelerated "drastically faster" since summer 2026, driven largely by the technology's growing capacity to build the next generation of AI systems. 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 advance without guardrails.

Amodei proposed a three-step plan for pacing development, covering stronger safety testing and independent evaluations of advanced models, coordination among leading AI companies, and greater international cooperation.

His position quickly won backing from Elon Musk, the billionaire who heads SpaceX, who said on X that "Dario is right". OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also endorsed the call, writing that he agreed on the need to pace the frontier and that it had been a primary topic of recent discussions at his company. Altman said OpenAI intends to adopt Anthropic's proposal by committing to independent evaluators with employee-like access.

Altman's concern about the technology predates the current boom. In a 2015 essay, he described the development of superhuman machine intelligence as probably the greatest threat to humanity's continued existence. Musk, for his part, was among the backers of a 2023 push by the non-profit Future of Life Institute to pause AI development for six months to allow safety guardrails to be put in place, and was part of a group of AI and robotics researchers who signed a 2015 open letter advocating a global ban on offensive autonomous weapons.

Not everyone shares the alarm. President Donald Trump dismissed the warnings about AI's potential risks as exaggerated, as the United States races to maintain its technological lead over China. Anthropic itself moved its AI risk assessment to "low" from "very low" last month.

The debate comes at a sensitive moment for Anthropic, which is preparing for a potential initial public offering, and follows OpenAI's decision to push back its own listing plans.