Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calls for global AI development slowdown; employees warn of extinction risk

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AI Safety Debate Intensifies as Anthropic Employees Go Viral; Industry Leaders Call for Slowdown

OpenAI and Anthropic agree that concerns over AI safety and "alignment" have been brewing for a long time, but those concerns reached a fever pitch last week after several tweets from Anthropic employees went viral.

"I resigned from Anthropic today," wrote Jacob Coxon. "I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

"Do not underestimate the power of this technology," he added. "These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing."

"Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!" wrote Evan Hubinger, another Anthropic worker. "I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to."

Drake Thomas, an Anthropic safety employee, said he would "burn my equity to the ground in a heartbeat for a 1% higher chance we make it out of this situation alive."

Industry Leaders Call for a Slowdown

In an essay released this weekend titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a global slowdown of AI development, citing risks such as "losing control of AI systems" and "misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism."

"Along with my co-founders and employees, I have grappled with this duality of risk and benefit since the beginning of Anthropic," Amodei wrote. "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."

He added that more prudence is necessary, and that recursive self-improvement—when AI systems design or train their own successors—must be "pursued very carefully, if at all." In other words, he wants a development slowdown for all large AI system builders.

Amodei's statement was quickly cosigned by OpenAI head Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, and xAI's Elon Musk.

Political and Regulatory Reactions

Meanwhile, former President Barack Obama privately urged House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.) to develop a plan for AI regulation and urged Democrats to develop a clear plan for how AI ought to be regulated ahead of the 2028 presidential election.

Criticism from Venture Capitalists

"Stop pretending you need anyone else's permission," responded venture capitalist David Sacks. "Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR [the nonprofit Model Evaluation & Threat Research] is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic's investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren't even at the frontier."

"Most of all," he added, "stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want."

Quick Hits

• New York Security: "Over the last three years, Jewish institutions across New York City have added millions more to their budgets for security protections amid an increase in antisemitic attacks, rabbis and Jewish community leaders say," reports The New York Times. "They have paid to hire more private security guards, increase the number of safety trainings at synagogues and schools, update their security cameras and fortify their buildings. They are also relying on more volunteer security guards at temples and encouraging those who attend services to be especially watchful. Their efforts have come into focus ahead of the 10-day period of somber introspection that takes place between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the holiest holiday in Judaism."

• Kennedy Center: "Leaders of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, installed by President Donald Trump, say the center is on the brink of bankruptcy and argue that putting the president's name on..."