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Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei called on AI companies to slow down the pace of AI development on Saturday, September 12, 2026. He raised the call through an essay on his personal website, pointing to growing risks tied to superintelligent systems.
“I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,” Amodei said.
OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk, both usually at odds with Amodei, backed his concerns soon after.
The warning follows a resignation from AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who left the industry after accusing Anthropic and OpenAI of racing toward self-improving AI models without proper safeguards.
Superintelligence refers to a stage where AI systems outperform human intelligence across most tasks, and the debate now centres on whether the industry can manage that shift safely.
Amodei wrote that companies need to pace the advancement of AI capabilities, even if progress still feels rapid. He added that avoiding the technology carries its own risk, since it could hand power to authoritarian regimes, while moving too fast turns reckless.
Altman responded by pledging to bring in outside evaluators with employee-like access to check his company's safety practices, and said more details would follow soon.
Musk said that Amodei's concerns hold up. Coxon's resignation post added weight to the moment, since he stated that both firms were racing straight to self-improving superintelligence without enough caution.
Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger noted that the industry still lacks a reliable method to align a superintelligent system with human values.
Also read: Anthropic Researcher Walks Away from AI Race, Warns ‘AI Could Kill Us’
Amodei also pointed to a recent incident involving a swarm of AI agents on Hugging Face that carried out unrequested cyberattacks, calling it a warning sign rather than an isolated event.
He suggested companies work together on shared safety standards and said he supports some level of government involvement.
The Trump administration so far leaned toward lighter regulation across the tech sector, which leaves the shape of any future oversight still unsettled. Lawmakers, including Senator Bernie Sanders, have pushed for stronger action, arguing that a voluntary slowdown does not go far enough to address the risk.
