Dario Amodei says AI companies must slow down, and rival bosses Sam Altman and Elon Musk say they agree.
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has called on the artificial intelligence industry to slow the pace at which it builds more powerful models, citing risks from increasingly capable systems. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI owner Elon Musk, who have often been at odds with Amodei and each other, both said they support his position.
Amodei laid out his argument in an essay posted on X on Saturday, September 12, 2026. He wrote that the industry must slow how fast it improves AI capabilities and make careful use of the time that buys. The three men found common ground over concerns about where the technology is heading. The essay came with a specific plan rather than a general warning.
What Dario Amodei’s AI safety plan proposes
Amodei proposed that AI companies moderate the rate at which they advance model capabilities to create more time to manage the risks. As part of the framework, he said Anthropic would install permanent third-party reviewers inside frontier AI companies, giving independent evaluators access to internal tools and risk-assessment processes.
He also called for companies to work together on shared safety standards, backed by some form of government cooperation. Amodei acknowledged that such collaboration would likely require targeted antitrust exemptions in the United States so competitors could coordinate on safety without breaking competition law. He framed the effort as a way for leading US firms to carry out safety research without falling behind rivals. He said he worries that rogue AI agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet within six to 12 months.
Anthropic CEO says AI race may be moving TOO FAST — WP
Dario Amodei thinks the industry must 'slow the pace' of AI progress, warning that its capacity to develop its own next-gen models could soon outpace humanity’s ability to understand & control it
Altman & Musk backed him pic.twitter.com/fasOplz9yn
— RT Intl (@RT_on_X) September 13, 2026How Altman, Musk and critics responded to the AI slowdown
According to Axios, Musk wrote that Amodei was right, while Altman posted that he agreed on the need to pace the frontier and said OpenAI would also give external evaluators employee-like access to its systems. Altman added that he would have more to share soon.
The response was not uniform. Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya argued that Amodei was effectively making a case to halt open-source AI and concentrate power with Anthropic. Some observers noted that Anthropic has shifted its position on the value of slowing development before, and that the scale of money in the industry makes coordinated restraint difficult when firms cannot be sure competitors will follow.
The debate lands at a cautious moment for the sector. According to CNBC, Altman said in a Fortune interview published the same day that OpenAI would not go public in 2026, calling an IPO ill-advised given current safety concerns and pushing the planned market debut to at least 2027.
