AI PROGRESS
Anthropic calls for AI slowdown, stocks stumble
The man building one of the world's most powerful AI systems just told the world to pump the brakes.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a sweeping 3,800-word essay this weekend calling on the AI industry to slow down.
Amodei laid out a three-part plan he's calling "pacing the frontier," arguing that recursive self-improvement (AI building better AI) is accelerating dangerously fast and that a recent incident involving a rogue swarm of OpenAI and Hugging Face agents nearly proved how badly things could go wrong.
Here's the breakdown:
What's new? Amodei is unilaterally committing Anthropic to "embedded evaluators" - third-party auditors with employee-like access to verify safety practices from the inside.
Who's backing it? Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Elon Musk (xAI) both publicly said they agree with Amodei, which is rare company to keep.
Why it matters? Amodei argues that without pacing, a misaligned AI swarm could take over the entire internet within 6-12 months - and the OAI-HF incident was a preview, not a fluke.
Amodei insists pacing doesn't mean stopping. He wants a window of 1-2 years to advance interpretability science, tighten operational security, and build models whose alignment can actually be verified.
The end goal is still the AI-accelerated cure for cancer and economic renaissance he's always described — just with fewer rogue agent swarms along the way.
Wall Street wasn’t happy
Markets weren't exactly sending a congratulatory bouquet. Nvidia dropped 3%, Intel and AMD each fell more than 4%, and memory chipmakers Micron and SanDisk slid between 4-4.5%. SoftBank - deep in on OpenAI - cratered nearly 11% in Japan.
Masayoshi Son reportedly lost $8 billion in personal fortune in a single day. Arm Holdings and CoreWeave each shed 6%.
And I thought I had it bad when I lost that £5 note. -MV