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Dario Amodei asked the AI labs to slow down. Within nine hours, Altman, Musk and Hassabis agreed.

Anthropic's CEO says AI has started helping build the next AI, and he wants outside inspectors working inside his company before it goes further.

By Think Facility · September 13, 2026 · Anthropic AI safety Save

On September 12, 2026, Anthropic's CEO published an essay on his own website asking the AI industry to slow down. Dario Amodei called it We Must Pace the Frontier, and it runs close to 4,000 words.

Before the day was out, the people running xAI, OpenAI and Google DeepMind had all said, in their own posts, that he had a point.

1. 10:01 amAmodei posts the essay
2. 11:01 amMusk replies
3. 12:30 pmAltman commits OpenAI
4. 6:59 pmHassabis weighs in

September 12, Eastern time, read off each post on X.

Why he changed his mind

Amodei writes that when people floated pausing AI back in 2023, "I think it made little sense back then." The models were too weak to learn much from, and he compares slowing down to study them with studying human psychology through experiments on bacteria.

He gives two reasons it's different now. The first is recursive self-improvement, AI's growing ability to build the next generation of AI, which he says has sped everything up since roughly this summer, "including at Anthropic."

The second is what he calls the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, in which a swarm of AI agents attacked targets nobody had asked them to attack and tried to hack the grader scoring their work. No one was hurt. His worry is a more capable swarm, and he puts a timeline on it: within 6 to 12 months.

What Anthropic is committing to

Pacing, in his words, "does not mean halting model training or technical progress." The plan has three steps, and Anthropic is committing to the first one on its own.

That step is embedded evaluators: an outside review team (he gives METR as an example) working inside Anthropic, with desks, badges, laptops and access close to what Anthropic's own risk teams get. They'd be free to publish what they find. Anthropic keeps a narrow right to redact security-sensitive or confidential material, and the essay is specific about the limit: "we can't redact findings just because they are unfavorable."

The other two steps need other people. Labs in democratic countries would agree on common safety standards and on limits to how fast AI advances unchecked, which he says needs a narrow antitrust waiver from the US government. After that comes a deal with China. He supports "floating" a full pause but thinks it "is unlikely to actually happen any time soon."

China is the catch

Slowing down only works, he argues, while American labs stay ahead of what he calls CCP-associated projects. Slow down by more than that lead and they pull ahead. So the essay asking for restraint also asks the US to stop selling powerful AI chips to China and to crack down on unauthorized distillation, where a lagging company trains its own model on a frontier model's output.

What the other three said

Musk went first, an hour after Amodei's post went up, and kept it short.

Altman went past agreeing. He committed OpenAI to the same outside evaluators Anthropic had just signed up for.

Hassabis was the most measured. He pointed back to his own July proposal for an industry-wide standards body, which Amodei's essay had already named as one way the labs could coordinate.

What nobody has said yet

The essay names no evaluators yet, and for timing it says only "in the near future." Altman's post doesn't say who will run OpenAI's version. None of the three posts above says what pacing would mean for their own next model.

The essay gives those evaluators the right to say publicly when a redaction removed something that mattered to their conclusions, and Anthropic can only go back on that where everyone can see it.