Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday called for a slowdown in the pace of advanced AI development, winning rare backing from SpaceX AI’s Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and sparking a debate over AI “doomerism”.
The debate has also started at a critical time for Anthropic as it prepares for a potential IPO and after OpenAI pushed back its own listing plans. “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.
President Donald Trump dismissed the warnings about AI’s potential risks as exaggerated, as the US races to maintain its lead against China for technological leadership, while Anthropic bumped AI risk assessment to “low” from “very low” last month. He cited the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, where an AI “swarm” conducted cybersecurity attacks, as a pivotal event demonstrating AI’s potential for “catastrophic damage” if capabilities grow without guardrails. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks,” Altman said as he reposted Amodei’s post on X.
