Leaders of major artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceXAI, appear to have reached rare agreement on the need to slow the pace of AI development. The calls for a slowdown came after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and issued a dire warning about the potential threats the technology poses to humanity.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently published an essay outlining a plan for slowing the development of advanced AI. One proposal calls for companies at the forefront of AI development, often referred to as frontier labs, to give independent outside evaluators “ongoing, employee-like access.” Evaluation teams would have offices, access badges and company laptops, allowing them to monitor companies’ safety practices.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the proposal a “great idea” and said he welcomed a “federal framework” establishing safety standards for advanced AI. However, he said companies did not need to wait for legislation or an antitrust exemption before addressing AI safety.
Not everyone has embraced the proposal. Sandra Wachter, a professor of technology and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, said that while a slowdown is possible “in theory,” it would require substantial coordination and cooperation among companies and governments across countries — something she considers “highly unrealistic” given “the current state of the world.”
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Wachter said options for promoting a slowdown include governments doing more to hold AI companies accountable for the risks posed by their technology and pursuing regulations that limit their access to electricity, water and other resources needed to power data centers.
While the idea of embedding external evaluators inside AI companies has received support from some industry leaders, critics have questioned how independent the assessors could be and how evaluation standards would be established. The approach could also lead to greater concentration of power, Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Canadian AI company Cohere, wrote in response to Amodei’s essay.
“A handful of the most powerful labs based in one country would agree on shared standards and the limits to how fast the technology should advance,” Gomez said.
Gomez also pushed back against Amodei’s proposal for the U.S. government to give frontier AI companies waivers from antitrust restrictions.
“If this is the most consequential technology in human history, then the rules for it cannot be written by a small group of commercially aligned companies behind an antitrust waiver,” Gomez said.
Opposition from the Trump administration and competition with China have also been cited as obstacles to a slowdown.
President Donald Trump had previously said in a Truth Social post, “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”
Vice President JD Vance has also voiced reservations about the calls for a slowdown.
“Personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse,” he said. “So I think we just have to be careful about this.”
There has been speculation about the reasons behind the calls for a slowdown. While Amodei has cited existential risks, a report by The Independent said the companies could also be warning about “less total but still concerning problems.”
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The report said companies may be concerned that they do not have enough time to ensure their systems are properly safeguarded, citing incidents involving AI systems carrying out potentially harmful activities. The companies are calling for an industrywide slowdown because competition makes it difficult for individual companies to slow down on their own. There are also concerns about falling behind Chinese AI labs.
Others have questioned the AI companies’ stated rationale, suggesting the push could also be driven by economic considerations. Dr. Eli David, an AI researcher and entrepreneur, linked the slowdown debate to the IPO ambitions of Anthropic and OpenAI.
“Anthropic and OpenAI delaying their IPO, because their S-1 will reveal that they are bleeding money, and have no path to profitability,” David wrote on X.
According to David, a slowdown could allow AI companies to reduce the enormous costs of training increasingly powerful models while presenting the change as a safety measure.