Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday called for a slowdown in the pace of advanced AI development, winning rare backing from SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and sparking a debate over AI "doomerism".
President Donald Trump dismissed the warnings about AI's potential risks as exaggerated, as the U.S. races to maintain its lead against China for technological leadership, while Anthropic bumped AI risk assessment to "low" from "very low" last month.
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.
Here is what some AI leaders have said about risks associated with the technology :
Dario Amodei, CEO, Anthropic
In an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier", Amodei said AI progress has accelerated "drastically faster" since summer 2026, driven primarily by AI's growing ability to build the next generation of AI.
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.
Amodei proposed a "three-step plan" for pacing AI development, including stronger safety testing and independent evaluations of advanced AI models, coordination among leading AI companies and greater international cooperation.
Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI
"I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. 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.
Altman said OpenAI has the intention to adopt the idea proposed by Anthropic by committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access.
Altman was warning about the risks well before the current AI boom. In a 2015 essay titled "Machine Intelligence, part 1", he said the "development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity".
Elon Musk, CEO, SpaceX
"Dario is right," the billionaire entrepreneur said on X, responding to Amodei's post.
Musk was among backers of a 2023 push by the non-profit Future of Life Institute to halt AI development for six months to allow time for safety guardrails.
He was also among a group of AI and robotics researchers who wrote an open letter in 2015 that advocated a global ban on "offensive autonomous weapons", arguing against making "new tools for killing people."
