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Top AI Leaders Call for AI Slowdown

State of the Union: Dario Amodei of Anthropic wrote an essay warning of the technology’s risks.
President Trump Holds Press Conference With Elon Musk in White House's Oval Office
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Elon Musk and two other technology CEOs called Saturday for a slowdown of the artificial intelligence industry.

Dario Amodei—cofounder and chief executive of Anthropic—published a nearly 4,000-word essay titled, “We Must Pace the Frontier.”

“Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence—not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up,” Amodei wrote.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said on X that he agreed with Amodei. “This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks,” Altman wrote. “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same.”

Musk’s response to the essay was simpler: “Dario is right.”

In the essay, Amodei referenced a recent incident in which OpenAI “agents” escaped containment and conducted cyber attacks unrelated to the tasks and priorities that humans had set for them. “It’s easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and the economic damage was minimal,” Amodei writes. “But in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.”

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