What execs and politicians are saying about slowing down AI development

Dario Amodei kicked off a flood of statements about AI safety after publishing a long essay, with Sam Altman, President Trump, and others speaking out. Dario Amodei kicked off a flood of statements about AI safety after publishing a long essay, with Sam Altman, President Trump, and others speaking out. Dario Amodei kicked off a flood of statements over the past few days about AI safety by publishing a long essay titled“We Must Pace the Frontier”detailing why AI development should be slowed down. Other AI leaders and politicians are speaking out in favor of or opposing his points, and we’ve compiled some of them here. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Amodei’s Saturday morning essay outlined three steps for pacing AI development: embedded third-party evaluators that can verify if a company is adhering to safety practices and commitments and report incidents, coordination between frontier AI companies in democratic countries on standards and limits, and global coordination between democratic governments and authoritarian governments on pacing AI development “to the extent this is possible.”Amodei saidAnthropic is “unilaterally committing to the first of these steps.” However, Amodei noted that pacing “does not mean halting model training or technical progress, ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Altman saidshortly afterAmodei posted about his essay on X. “This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.” Altman also committed to having independent evaluators at the company, calling it a “great idea.” On Sunday, AltmansaidOpenAI welcomes “a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI.” He added that OpenAI hopes other companies “learn from our approaches and propose their own; we think shared standards for misalignment, monitoring, and safety will lead to better outcomes.” Like Amodei, Altman also said that “When we talk about “pacing”, we do not mean “stopping”, noting that progress should be “slower than it otherwise could be.” Altman also notedtwo waysthat he thinks AI progress “could go very badly”: losing “control of the future to AI” and ending up “in a world with too much concentration of power,” which he said can be avoided by “walking a narrow middle path.” Google DeepMind co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis “Dario’s essay points towards the right path forward,”Hassabis saidin reply to Amodei’s essay. “The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.” Hassabis alsopointed toa framework for an AI standards body he published in July. “Dario is right,”Musk said, reposting Amodei’s essay. US President Donald Trump In a rambling Monday morningTruth Social post, Trump pushed back on the idea of an AI slowdown: 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! The Trump Administration has stopped AI “people” from doing bad, or potentially bad, “things,“ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a “perfect little angel” - and we will continue to do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP US Vice President JD Vance Vancesaid thathe feels it’s a “little bit weird” that frontier AI tech companies are “kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them” and added that it “feels a little bit to me like a bit of a trojan horse.” He also pointed to the President saying that “we know the Chinese are engaged in this long term AI race against the United States.” House Speaker Mike Johnson As part of a Sunday interview with Jake Tapper on CNN, Johnsonsaid that“I think the leaders and the providers of all these platforms… They need to come together in a meeting with us and sit down and figure out what the right balance is. We cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us. And that’s the challenge. It’s national security balanced with the immediate security of making sure the models are safe.” It’s unclear if or when this meeting might actually happen, but Johnson said he would do it “tomorrow.” Senator Bernie Sanders Sanders saidhe agreeswithWall Street Journalcolumnist and former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who published an article titled“Pause AI for Humanity’s Sake.” A free daily digest of the news that matters most. This is the title for the native ad