Story
September 14, 2026
AI Rivals Back a Slowdown, but Critics See a Power Play
AI leaders are converging on the view that capability gains must be paced until safety work catches up, while skeptics argue that a deal designed by the biggest labs could turn public anxiety into a barrier protecting their market power.
Earlier in the week, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned publicly, accusing Anthropic and OpenAI of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”1 His exit sharpened a safety debate already inflamed by reports of rogue AI-agent incidents and by researchers’ fears that models are becoming increasingly able to help build their successors.
On Saturday, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei turned that alarm into a concrete demand: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”2 His three-part plan calls for permanent, employee-level access for independent evaluators; coordinated safety limits among frontier labs in democratic countries; and eventual international agreements, including with China. Anthropic said it would adopt the evaluator measure unilaterally.
3
The response from rivals was unusually swift. OpenAI chief Sam Altman said he agreed that the industry needed to “pace the frontier” and would match the outside-evaluator commitment.4 Elon Musk, often an Altman antagonist, offered an even shorter endorsement: “Dario is right.”
5 Hugging Face’s Clément Delangue argued that alignment “won’t be solved behind the closed doors of a handful of frontier labs,” while launching an Open Alignment Initiative and seeking a role in the evaluator program.
6
But the consensus has exposed its own contradiction. Critics say catastrophic-risk rhetoric can distract from harms already occurring—and that a coordinated slowdown may become regulatory capture, serving Anthropic and OpenAI more than the public.7 David Sacks drove at the same concern, noting that Amodei and Altman already have a “duopoly on frontier intelligence.”
8
That leaves the central question unanswered: who monitors a pact among the companies asking to be trusted? Amodei’s plan depends on government backing to navigate antitrust law and on some cooperation with China—two formidable tests for a safety truce forged in the middle of an AI arms race.