Over the summer, the populist cry for a global AI “pause,” which started among small activist groups, was taken up by senior AI CEOs and left-leaning politicians. This weekend, AI industry leaders are now suggesting a coordinated “slowdown” of frontier AI research and capabilities and giving the tech to a collection of democratic nations.
This would not only require direct coordination between top AI companies and oversight by government bodies, but it would also give them a solid advantage over open-source competitors, cementing a practical duopoly.
This is crony capitalism in the agentic age, dressed up as altruism, and designed to halt the efforts of the open-source AI community.
“(S)ociety must have a say in how this technology is used, and more time for the necessary public deliberations — which pacing the frontier would bring us — is surely a good thing,” wrote Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, maker of the popular Claude platform.
Amodei’s comments were echoed by Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at both Anthropic and OpenAI, who resigned with a dire warning about the state of AI progress. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote on X, a tweet thread that has now been viewed close to 200 million times.
As many have noted, an obscure tech worker has posted on social media and is getting catapulted overnight into the role of the ultimate AI doomsayer, cited by most senior politicians in industrialized nations calling for broad AI regulation. Some former colleagues at both OpenAI and Anthropic supported his comments online, and Coxon hit the Sunday news shows to reiterate his expertly crafted warning.