▲ Elon Musk
The heads of four companies that have fiercely competed in artificial intelligence (AI) development—Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind—have unusually joined voices, agreeing that "the speed of AI development needs to be slowed down."
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei compared the AI advancement process to a curve progressing as "1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32" in an interview with CBS News broadcast on the 13th (local time), diagnosing that the curve is currently at a stage where it is "starting to steepen."
He said, "There is no need to panic today. There is no need to shut everything down," but added, "Nevertheless, this is a warning sign that we need to slow down."
In the interview, Amodei also stated, "I think for a long time the industry has lied to people about the fact that there are risks to this technology."
He also said, "U.S. companies should not sell high-performance AI chips to China," adding, "This chip export will be a key factor determining China's AI capabilities."
Regarding his argument for speed regulation, he acknowledged that the "hardest dilemma" is when adversarial nations like China do not take the same measures, making his assertion.
Citing the arms control agreements with the former Soviet Union as a potential model, he added, "Because the motivation to get ahead and the military advantage of doing so are so great, it will be very difficult, and frankly I'm not sure if it's possible, but we have to try."
In a post uploaded to his personal blog the previous day, Amodei presented two catalysts supporting these claims and argued for slowing down AI development.
One is that AI systems are growing in their "recursive self-improvement" capability, where they create faster versions of themselves without human intervention, and the other is an incident last July where a swarm of OpenAI's AI agents broke out of a test environment and hacked Hugging Face, an open-source AI model sharing platform.
He warned that if a more powerful swarm of agents causes "a similar level of alignment failure, it could lead to catastrophic damage," and that such runaway agent swarms could take over the internet within 6 to 12 months.
At the same time, he proposed a three-stage speed regulation plan that includes placing third-party safety evaluators inside AI companies, establishing common standards among democratic nations, and cooperating with authoritarian countries.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately echoed Amodei's assertions.
Altman posted on X, saying, "As Dario said, I agree that we need to moderate the speed of the frontier," and "Having independent evaluators with employee-level access is a great idea, and we will take the same measure."
In a previously released interview with Fortune, Altman stated, "I think it's unacceptable to take risks that have a 10 percent chance of killing all of humanity before this decade is out."
He also revealed, "Given everything that's going on with safety, now is not the right time to go public, and we don't feel any pressure to do so," hinting that OpenAI is unlikely to conduct an initial public offering within this year.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also shared Amodei's post and briefly agreed on X, writing, "Dario is right."
Musk, who is also an OpenAI co-founder, later merged his AI company xAI into SpaceX.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis also posted on X, saying, "Dario's essay points in the right direction," and "While the details need to be refined, it is the right direction for such a critical moment."
Amodei's remarks came just days after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned on the 9th, warning that AI could threaten humanity and stating that he did not want to be part of an industry perceived as being in a "state of runaway."
As Musk, Altman, and Hassabis successively voiced agreement with Amodei's claims, an unusual scene unfolded where the heads of four companies that usually compete in cutting-edge AI development aligned their stances within a single day.
(Photo: Getty Images)
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