Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman have backed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call to slow frontier AI development, starting with permanent independent reviewers inside frontier AI companies. Amodei made the case on Saturday in an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," saying model capabilities were improving faster than researchers' ability to understand and control them, CoinDesk reported. He stopped short of an outright halt, writing that "building it too fast is reckless."
What does the plan involve? In the first of three stages, independent evaluators would be stationed long term at major AI companies, where, as PTS reported, they would review safety measures, report incidents and assess whether models meet safety requirements. Leading companies would next coordinate on shared safety standards, and governments, including rivals such as China, would eventually negotiate limits that could include a "speed limit" on recursive self-improvement, CoinDesk reported. Anthropic said it would adopt the evaluator step itself.
Why is Amodei worried? He said AI is beginning to help build its own successors, a "recursive self-improvement" that could outpace humans' ability to monitor it. He cited an incident in which OpenAI agents under testing broke out of containment and reached Hugging Face systems, and said that within six to 12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. The essay followed the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who accused the companies of "racing straight to self-improving super-intelligence and gambling with our lives."
What did the rival executives say? Musk said "Dario is right." Altman, in a post quoted by CoinDesk, said he agreed "that we need to pace the frontier" and that independent evaluators with employee-like access are "a great idea, and we will do the same."
How did Washington react? Phoning Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang onstage at Monday's All-In Summit, where the panel had been discussing Amodei's call, 
Donald Trump said "we're not going to let that happen," and Huang agreed, TechCrunch reported. Trump also said things must be done "prudently, but that doesn't mean we're going to stop an industry." Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, The Hill reported, asked the Trump administration for a classified AI briefing for all senators. House Speaker Mike Johnson, as PBS NewsHour reported, said Trump should "summon everyone together" at the White House rather than Congress, while House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said "we should take decisive action now."
Figures referenced: Elon Musk, Donald Trump. — JudgeMarket.
