SAN FRANCISCO — In a development economists are describing as “remarkable” and one hedge fund is describing as “finally,” the chief executives of the country’s largest artificial intelligence companies agreed over the weekend that the industry should slow down, and the stock market, for one shining moment, agreed with them.
The consensus began when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for the industry to deliberately throttle the pace of its most advanced models so that safety research can catch up, reporting on the essay notes. He did so with the kind of restraint that only comes from a man who has already had one of his safety researchers resign with a warning and another follow shortly after.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
What followed was, in the words of one trade publication, “nine startling hours.” Elon Musk, whose company has been pointedly absent from previous industry-wide calls for restraint, replied with three words: “Dario is right.” Hours later, OpenAI’s Sam Altman posted that he agreed the industry needs to “pace the frontier” and announced his company would bring in outside evaluators with employee-level access — a commitment so significant that analysts are now calling it a turning point for the sector.
“We could lose control,” Altman was quoted as saying — which is the kind of sentence a chief executive does not say lightly, and the kind of sentence a chief executive does not say on a weekend, unless the weekend in question has been very good for him.
Not everyone is celebrating, though. Congressional observers note the chance of the legislature acting on the matter in the coming weeks is, in the estimation of the people who would do the acting, “next to zero,” which is a phrase reporters covering the capitol have used before and will no doubt use again.
THE SLOWDOWN: AS AGREED
- Who agreed: The CEOs of the four largest AI labs, in an agreement so rare it has already been described as "startling" by people who describe most things as "startling"
- What was agreed: To slow down, specifically, the pace, specifically, of the frontier
- Who did not agree, but agreed anyway: Elon Musk, who has a history of disagreeing with everything and is, in this instance, "right"
- Who gets to verify it: Outside evaluators with employee-level access, which is a phrase that means something and also does not mean what you think it means
- What Congress will do about it: A study group, probably
Industry veterans say the timing is not an accident. One former tech executive, who has described every past industry “pause” as either a strategy or a market correction, declined to say which it was this time, which is, insiders confirm, the most honest answer anyone has given on the subject all week.
What is not in dispute is the economic logic. A slower industry is a predictable industry. A predictable industry is an investable industry. And an investable industry, as every lobbyist in town will tell you before lunch, is an industry that can be asked very politely to remember that.
At press time, the four companies had not yet named the task force responsible for measuring the pace of the frontier, and two of the four were in meetings about whether the other two were measuring it correctly.