• Oracle started a new round of job cuts this week.
• An internal document spells out more details what those employees get in severance, stocks, and bonuses.
• The cuts come as Oracle continues an aggressive AI infrastructure buildout.

Oracle employees caught in the company’s latest round of layoffs now know exactly what they’ll leave behind and what they’ll take with them.

An internal FAQ document viewed by Business Insider lays out more details for staff impacted, including severance capped at 26 weeks, canceled stock awards, lost bonuses, and deadlines for exercising vested options.

Oracle started notifying affected staff on Monday. Business Insider reported last month that the company had drawn up plans for double-digit percentage layoffs on some teams to reduce payroll as it racks up billions in debt to fund AI infrastructure.

Employees were offered four weeks’ base salary plus one week per year of employment, according to documents viewed by Business Insider. The full FAQ document includes the maximum severance payout and what happens to employee bonuses, commissions, and stock options.

The details offer a window into the employee impact of Oracle’s latest cost-cutting push. The company has shed tens of thousands of workers while borrowing heavily and spending tens of billions of dollars to build data centers and other infrastructure needed to support its AI ambitions. For employees leaving in the latest cuts, the financial impact extends beyond losing a paycheck: unvested stock disappears, future corporate bonuses are forfeited, and participation in employee stock programs ends.

Oracle executives didn’t directly address the layoffs in an employee town hall this week, but Chief Financial Officer Hilary Maxson told staff the company needs to be “thoughtful” about where it spends tims and money.

“I don’t mean doing more with less, which is a phrase that I really, really don’t like,” Maxson said. “It means simplifying processes that don’t help customers and making clear choices on where we’re going to use our resources where they have the greatest impact.”

This latest round of layoffs follows cuts earlier this year. The company’s workforce declined by 21,000, or 13%, in the 2026 fiscal year that ended May 31, according to a recent filing.

Oracle’s severance package is comparatively less generous than those offered by other Big Tech companies over the past year.

Salesforce’s standard policy offers up to 30 weeks of severance pay, with a minimum of 9 or 13 weeks based on role, plus an additional 3 weeks of service per year.

Microsoft offered employees in its latest round of layoffs this summer up to 39 weeks’ base pay, with a minimum of 60 days and one or two additional weeks per six months of service, depending on seniority.

Severance

• Employees receive four weeks of base pay for their first year of service, plus one additional week of base pay for each additional year worked. Six months or more in the last year of employment will count as a full year.

• Total severance is capped at 26 weeks of base salary, paid out about three weeks after employees sign a severance agreement and return company property.
• Employees rehired within six months may have to repay a portion of their severance.

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

• Participation ends on the employee’s termination date.
• Contributions made during the current offering period are generally refunded without interest in the employee’s final paycheck.
• Employees who leave during specific purchase windows (Sept. 16—30 or March 16—31) will have their contributions used to purchase stock instead of receiving a refund.

Stock options

• All unvested stock options are canceled when employment ends.
• Employees generally have up to three months after termination to exercise vested options, subject to the original expiration date.
• Some options granted through acquired companies may have a shorter, one-month exercise window.

Restricted Stock Units

• All unvested RSUs are canceled upon termination.
• Previously vested RSUs remain the employee’s property and stay in their Fidelity brokerage account.

Vacation and sick pay

• Accrued vacation is prorated through the employee’s termination date and paid out according to company policy.
• Unused paid sick leave is not paid out at separation unless required by applicable law.

Bonuses

• Employees on sales or consulting bonus plans may receive any bonus earned under the terms of their compensation plan.
• Employees on corporate bonus plans are not eligible for future corporate bonus payouts after termination.

Commissions

• Employees stop earning commissions on their last day of employment.
• Commissions already earned but not yet paid remain payable under the terms of the applicable compensation plan.

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• Prince Harry and Meghan Markle aren’t working royals despite living in the UK again.
• There are 11 working family members in the British royal family. 
• A majority of those members are older than 75, including King Charles and Queen Camilla.

Though the royal family itself is growing, the number of people who work for the British monarchy might be smaller than you think.

Working royals represent the monarchy at royal engagements, from charitable events to state ceremonies. Kids like Prince George or extended members of the royal family like Princess Beatrice don’t attend events in an official capacity.

There are currently only 11 working royals, and many of them are over 75. King Charles is on the younger end at 77, 50 years older than Queen Elizabeth was when she inherited the crown.

Here’s a full list of who currently represents the British monarchy, plus a rundown of why a few former working royals no longer do.

King Charles III

King Charles, 77, formally known as the Prince of Wales, is the eldest son of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II. At 32, Charles married Lady Diana Spencer. The former couple welcomed two sons: Prince William and Prince Harry.

Charles and Diana separated in 1992 before her death five years later in Paris. He married Queen Camilla, formerly the Duchess of Cornwall, in a civil ceremony in April 2005.

He became King Charles in September 2022 following the death of his mother, making him the oldest person to take the throne in British history.

Throughout his life, Charles has remained one of the most prominent British royals and has continued to perform public engagements. He stepped back from “front-facing duties” while he was being treated for cancer in early 2024, but he was still involved in “state business and official paperwork.” He returned to a more normal working schedule in April 2024 and has been working fairly steadily since.

Queen Camilla

Camilla, the daughter of wealthy aristocrats, became a member of the British royal family after marrying King Charles in April 2005. Although her relationship with Charles made her Princess of Wales, she opted to use the title Duchess of Cornwall because it wasn’t closely associated with Princess Diana.

Camilla, 79, and Charles never had children, but she shares two with her former husband, Andrew Parker Bowles: Tom Parker Bowles and Laura Lopes.

Before her death, Queen Elizabeth announced that she wanted Camilla to become “Queen Consort,” which refers to the spouse or companion of a monarch. Since becoming Queen, Camilla has appeared at many public engagements in support of the royal family.

The Prince and Princess of Wales

Prince William, heir to the throne, is the eldest son of King Charles III and Princess Diana. William met Kate, both 44, while attending the University of St Andrews from 2001 to 2005.

William proposed to Kate during an October 2010 vacation to Kenya, and they officially married in April 2011, when they were granted the titles Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The king made them the Prince and Princess of Wales in September 2022, following Queen Elizabeth’s death.

From 2013 to 2018, the couple welcomed three children: Prince George, 13, Princess Charlotte, 11, and Prince Louis, 8.

During their marriage, William and Kate have performed numerous royal duties together, often undertaking royal tours and welcoming guests to state visits alongside King Charles and Queen Camilla.

Kate took a break from her royal duties in the first half of 2024 when she was undergoing treatment for cancer. She appeared at Trooping the Colour and Wimbledon in the summer of 2024 before announcing she had completed chemotherapy in September. She ramped back up her royal engagements in the fall, and in January 2025, she shared that she was in remission.

Anne, Princess Royal

Anne, 76, is the second-oldest child of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II. Anne’s official biography said that she began public engagements at 18 in 1969 and received the Princess Royal title in 1987.

She married Captain Mark Phillips in November 1973, but the pair divorced in April 1992. They share two children: Peter Phillips and Zara Phillips. Anne went on to marry Admiral Timothy Lawrence in December 1992.

Anne has been an avid horseback rider, even competing in the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games. She has also consistently supported the British monarchy; in 2025, she attended the most royal engagements of any member of the royal family aside from the king, as Vanity Fair reported.

Most recently, the Princess Royal accompanied William to the funeral of King Harald V of Norway in September 2026.

The Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh

Prince Edward, 62, is the youngest child of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II. When Edward married Sophie Helen Rhys-Jones, 61, in 1999, they became the Earl and Countess of Wessex. The couple has welcomed two children: Lady Louise Windsor and James, Earl of Wessex.

King Charles gave the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh titles to the couple in March 2023.

Edward’s official biography said he developed a love for television production and writing, prompting him to found his own company — Ardent Productions — in 1993. Sophie’s biography said she began her career in public relations, working for five years before starting her own firm. Notably, Edward took over the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award for his father, championing young people.

The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester

Prince Richard, the second son of Prince Henry and Princess Alice, is Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin. His biography said Richard, 82, became heir to his father’s title as Duke of Gloucester when his older brother died in a flying accident in 1972. He officially received the title after his father’s death in 1974.

Richard married Birgitte van Deurs, 80, in 1972, and they had three children together: Alexander Windsor, Earl of Ulster; Lady Davina Lewis; and Lady Rose Gilman.

Richard and Birgitte have supported the monarchy in public engagements, with Richard’s first engagement being the wedding of Nepal’s crown prince, according to his biography. In August 2026, the couple attended a ceremony marking the UK’s first National Day for Victims and Survivors of Terrorism, and they are often photographed at events such as Royal Ascot and Wimbledon.

The Duke of Kent

Prince Edward, son of Prince George and Princess Marina, is a first cousin to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. The 90-year-old received the Duke of Kent title in 1942 when his father died in a “wartime flying accident” near Scotland, his biography said.

It added that Edward joined the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where he qualified as a French interpreter and won the Sir James Moncrieff Grierson Award for foreign languages. Edward became a working member of the royal family after retiring from the British Army in 1976.

Edward married the late Miss Katharine Worsley in June 1961 and had three children: George, Earl of St Andrews; Lady Helen Taylor; and Lord Nicholas Windsor. Worsley died at 92 in September 2025.

Edward became the President of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1970 as part of his royal duties. In May 2026, he was at the king’s side during a service for the Order of St Michael and St George at St Paul’s Cathedral, and he most recently appeared at Wimbledon.

Princess Alexandra

Princess Alexandra, 89, is the sister of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. Her biography said she was the first British princess to attend an “ordinary” school and is a trained nurse.

Alexandra married Angus Ogilvy, son of the Earl of Airlie, in April 1963, when her chief bridesmaid was a 13-year-old Princess Anne. The couple has two children: James and Marina.

According to her biography, Alexandra and Ogilvy performed numerous public duties before his death in December 2004, and she still attends engagements on her own today. The princess attended a celebration at Buckingham Palace in April 2026 to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s 100th birthday.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex stepped back as working royals in January 2020.

Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, “stepped back” as senior members of the royal family in 2020 and said they would not return as working royals.

Harry, 42, and Meghan, 45, moved from the UK to North America in March 2020, first living in Canada and then settling in Montecito, California.

The couple was raising Prince Archie, 7, and their daughter, Princess Lilibet, 5, in California, and operating as private citizens, producing television shows for Netflix, podcasts, and Meghan’s business, As Ever.

Their relationship with the royal family has remained frosty since they stepped back, but Harry saw his father a handful of times in 2025 and 2026. In August 2026, he and Meghan moved back to the London area and enrolled their children in UK schools, as outlets like the BBC and People reported at the time.

In September 2026, the Lord Chamberlain sent a letter on behalf of King Charles clarifying that the couple’s physical return to the UK wouldn’t change their status as working royals, as the BBC reported.

The letter, which was sent to the duke and duchess, the military, and the government, said the couple will remain “private citizens with commercial and charitable interests” and cannot use their HRH titles when supporting charities or other organizations.

Buckingham Palace and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider on the matter.

The royal formerly known as Prince Andrew was stripped of his royal patronages in 2022.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, younger brother to the king, was demoted by Queen Elizabeth in 2022. The Queen stripped Mountbatten-Windsor of his military titles and royal patronages after he was accused of sexual assault in a lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre. He has repeatedly denied Giuffre’s allegations. He settled the lawsuit in 2022 without admitting wrongdoing.

In October 2025, he gave up his royal titles as scrutiny surrounding his links to Jeffrey Epstein intensified. A statement from Buckingham Palace said, “Prince Andrew will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.”

“In discussion with The King, and my immediate and wider family, we have concluded the continued accusations about me distract from the work of His Majesty and the Royal Family,” Mountbatten-Windsor said in his own statement. “I have decided, as I always have, to put my duty to my family and country first. I stand by my decision five years ago to stand back from public life.”

“With His Majesty’s agreement, we feel I must now go a step further,” he added. “I will therefore no longer use my title or the honours which have been conferred upon me. As I have said previously, I vigorously deny the accusations against me.”

In February 2026, Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office related to his ties to Epstein. Police released him under investigation about 11 hours after his arrest.

He has repeatedly denied any involvement with Epstein’s sex-trafficking crimes.

• Lizzie Borden’s former home was sold in 2021 for nearly $2 million.
• The home’s dark past has made it a popular New England attraction for true-crime fans.
• Now operating as a B&B, the home has eight bedrooms and furnishings from the 1800s.

In December 1892, Lizzie Borden was arrested on suspicion of killing her father and stepmother with a hatchet in their Fall River, Massachusetts, home.

Nearly 10 months after her arrest, Borden was acquitted of the crimes, in part because prosecutors lacked physical evidence linking her to the killings. No one else was charged in connection with the murders, and more than a century later, the case remains unsolved.

The crime has inspired countless adaptations, including Netflix’s “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story,” the fourth installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s anthology series, which premieres September 17.

While the story continues to draw audiences, the Borden home has become an attraction in its own right. Last listed for sale in 2021 for $2 million, the property now offers ghost tours and operates as a bed-and-breakfast, with rooms starting at $259 a night.

Take a look inside the site of one of America’s earliest true-crime stories.

The Borden family house is in Fall River, Massachusetts.

Fall River is about 52 miles south of Boston, near the border between Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Andrew Borden was a well-to-do businessman.

According to the Lizzie Borden House’s bed-and-breakfast website, although Andrew Borden was born into a prominent New England family, he grew up middle-class.

He began his career as a carpenter and cabinetmaker, later amassing a considerable fortune through a mix of real estate investments, mill ownership, and banking. At the time of his death, his net worth was reportedly over $300,000, equivalent to roughly $10 million today, according to the website.

Andrew carefully selected their Massachusetts home.

The house was built in 1845 and purchased by Andrew Borden in the 1870s, local news outlet WJAR reported.

Borden chose the home in part for its practical location — a short walk from his Main Street businesses in a bustling part of town —according to the Borden bed-and-breakfast’s website.

Over a century later, the Borden home has become a popular tourist attraction.

Donald Woods and Leann Wilbur operated the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast Museum for more than 15 years before selling it in 2021.

Lance Zaal, founder of US Ghost Adventures, bought the property for $1.8 million and has continued operating it as an inn and museum, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The home looks as though it were pulled straight from the pages of a history book.

While some of the home’s furnishings have been replaced over the years with replicas, its original doors and hardware remain intact.

Period details are scattered throughout the home, including sewing machines, lanterns, and mannequins dressed in floor-length, era-appropriate gowns.

The home is spread out over three levels.

Altogether, the home occupies a little over 3,600 square feet.

The spacious home can be booked in its entirety and accommodates groups of up to 20 people.

Floor plans of the home shared with Business Insider show it has 8 bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms.

The second and third floors are almost exclusively devoted to living quarters.

All of the bedrooms have floral wallpaper, ornate dressers, and large wooden headboards.

For an additional $30, guests can also arrange to have an axe placed on the beds.

Most of the bedrooms are on the second floor, and some are on the third.

The primary bedroom includes an en suite bathroom with a tub, according to The Seyboth Team, the brokerage that handled the property’s most recent sale.

You can stay in one of the home’s rooms for $249 a night.

Though the home operates as a bed-and-breakfast, it also remains a museum and tour site. Guests staying more than one night must vacate the property between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.

This is the John V. Morse Suite.

This room is where Abby Borden was found after her murder. Eerily, a photograph of Lizzie Borden hangs in the bedroom.

According to the bed-and-breakfast’s website, guests have reported paranormal experiences in rooms throughout the home.

This was Andrew and Abby’s bedroom.

It’s the only suite in the entire home that has its own bathroom.

The kitchen is located on the first floor.

The home has an old-fashioned wood-burning stove that certainly looks like a throwback to the 1800s.

It also has modern appliances like a coffee maker and a dishwasher.

Despite modern appliances, the room still feels historical.

The first floor has several rooms dedicated to entertaining.

At first glance, this unassuming sitting room appears rather ordinary. But it conceals a dark history: Andrew Borden was killed here while sitting on the large black couch.

There’s a less eerie space for entertaining.

For couples drawn to the home’s spooky history, the Borden house hosts several weddings each year. This room would make an intimate setting for a cocktail hour.

The home also has a separate gift shop.

The gift shop sells items including a Lizzie Borden coloring book, a collector’s miniature hatchet, and a mug modeled after Lizzie’s mug shot.

• McKinsey QuantumBlack leader Ben Ellencweig said the firm is embracing a more technical talent pool.
• “Our recruiting changed dramatically in the last few years,” Ellencweig told BI.
• McKinsey isn’t the only firm shifting its talent base. EY has also expanded from accountants.

Once famous for its ties to business schools, McKinsey is casting a wider net to meet its needs.

For decades, an MBA was one of the clearest routes into elite consulting. As AI changes the work firms do for clients, the consulting industry is looking for people who can build technology as well as devise the corporate strategy around it.

“Our recruiting changed dramatically in the last few years. We recruit from places we haven’t recruited before,” Ben Ellencweig, who leads McKinsey’s AI arm, QuantumBlack, told Business Insider. “Today many, many of our colleagues are coming from non-MBA backgrounds, and then technology too is kind of the next wave.”

That includes mathematicians, computer-science PhDs, startup founders without degrees, and people with experience at technology companies.

The shift is playing out beyond McKinsey. Job postings from Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG, McKinsey, BCG, and Bain fell by about 24% in the year ending May 2026 compared to the year before, according to labor-market intelligence firm Draup. At the same time, AI jobs grew from 1.4% to 5% of their total openings.

The number of forward-deployed-engineer openings across the seven firms rose from none to 1,404 in that same period, according to the analysis. Such roles require engineers who can deploy and run production AI systems inside organizations, and also do the client-facing work traditionally associated with consulting.

According to McKinsey’s current job postings, most of those roles require at least four or five years of computer-related engineering experience.

Ellencweig said McKinsey is looking to fill these roles with “curious people” who are excited to work with clients and solve problems through technology, but who also bring deep technical skills. The firm is recruiting from different geographies, schools, and “outside-of-school, non-school backgrounds,” he said.

In an email to Business Insider, the firm added that it is recruiting through “less traditional pathways,” such as coding programs and bootcamps.

QuantumBlack itself has grown from 47 data scientists working with a Formula 1 team to “well above 5,000” AI professionals over the past decade, Ellencweig said. Those workers include data scientists, data engineers, designers, product managers, and product owners.

McKinsey rival EY has recently spoken about its own push to widen its talent pool. Ginnie Carlier, EY Americas’ chief talent and culture officer, told BI earlier this year that the Big Four firm was once exclusively made up of accountants, but now it also hires engineers, creatives, and technologists.

Ellencweig said McKinsey is reinventing itself around technology, including how it hires and how it develops current employees.

“I view our entire workforce, the entire McKinsey, including our consultant cohort, becoming very technology savvy,” McKinsey’s Ellencweig said.

• Some laid-off Uber employees say that AI was playing a bigger role in their day-to-day work.
• They used AI tools to respond to customer service messages and answer questions posted in Slack.
• Uber said its latest layoffs were about reducing “management layers” and didn’t mention AI.

At Uber, AI does everything from answering employees’ questions in Slack to writing the response you get when you message customer service during a ride.

Six recently laid-off employees who spoke with Business Insider pointed to several ways that AI became more prevalent in their jobs over the past few months. Some said that they were prompting AI to do substantial portions of their work.

Uber declined to comment for this story. Earlier this month, the company laid off about 3,300 people, including all of the employees Business Insider spoke with for this article.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at the time that the layoffs aimed to cut “management layers” and reduce the number of teams where managers had as few as one or two direct reports. Khosrowshahi didn’t cite AI as a motivation in a memo announcing the layoffs.

At the same time, the employees who spoke with Business Insider said that the company has pushed ahead with implementing AI in a wide variety of uses.

One employee said that in the weeks before being laid off he was using an AI tool that reduced the time it took to do his job to one-fifth of what it used to be.

“AI definitely feels like the dynamite under the bridge for a lot of us,” the employee said.

‘Don’t be using ChatGPT to do your work for you’

A laid-off employee in Uber’s advertising business said that managers were increasingly urging them to use Gemini and ChatGPT to prepare for client meetings.

“We were asked to use AI all the time,” the employee said. “It was part of our day-to-day work.”

In many internal Slack channels, Uber uses an AI chatbot called Genie, which provides “prompt responses with proper citations from Uber’s internal documentation,” the company wrote in a blog post last year.

The chatbot provides answers to questions that employees post, the employee said, providing a lot of guidance that previously came from managers.

“If anybody else had an answer for you, then they replied,” the employee said. “But it was usually AI replying to us about any questions we had.”

Another employee who worked in customer service said that they used Glean, a similar tool trained on internal company documents, to respond to help requests from Uber drivers and passengers.

The tools were meant to help customer service agents find information, the employee said. They often copied and pasted answers from the tools directly into the chat.

“It wasn’t what we were supposed to use, but it was a tool available to use when our knowledge base wasn’t working,” the employee said.

Other Uber employees said that their managers cautioned against that sort of AI use.

“We’re also getting guidance like ‘Don’t be using ChatGPT to do your work for you,'” Kori X, a former evaluation specialist on Uber’s GenAI team said.

“I think they’re struggling with why they are paying these people if they’re just using ChatGPT,” X said.

Uber saw ‘real tailwinds’ from AI productivity

Another laid-off employee said that they didn’t feel pressured to use AI at work.

The company took a measured approach to implementing AI compared to other tech companies, this employee said, offering office hours, explaining to employees what AI could and couldn’t do, and curbing the use of AI-generated pictures in external communication.

Uber previously said it has used forward-deployed engineers in “agentic pods” to identify uses of AI across the company, from finance to HR.

Uber started cutting off or reducing credits to services like Claude in the first half of this year, the employee said.

Uber executives said around the same time that they had already spent their Claude budget for the year and that the company wasn’t seeing productivity gains commensurate with what it was spending on AI tools.

In a presentation at an industry conference last week, Khosrowshahi cited some of the same justifications for the layoffs as in his memo the previous week.

Uber wanted to “have more doers versus managers,” he said, and reduced the number of “micro-teams” where managers had as few as one or two direct reports.

At the same time, Uber saw an opportunity with the restructuring to take advantage of “real tailwinds as it relates to productivity, whether it is AI or general productivity technology as well,” he said.

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• Alex Karp argues that AI companies are collecting intellectual property.
• Karp told CNBC that AI companies could face lawsuits over the intellectual property they collect.
• He said those liability risks could ultimately force AI labs to seek nationalization.

Alex Karp says there’s more to Anthropic’s plea for government regulation than safety.

Palantir’s CEO said in a Thursday interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that frontier AI labs like Anthropic are seeking nationalization to protect themselves from future lawsuits alleging they stole intellectual property.

“These businesses have to be nationalized because if you don’t nationalize them, every single one of my clients is going to sue,” Karp said of AI labs. “The obvious solution is America.”

Karp said some of Palantir’s clients have told him that their proprietary business ideas are ending up as training data for chatbots and being exposed to the wider world.

“They find out that the competitor next door has all of their output,” Karp said.

A potential barrage of lawsuits, Karp said, could spur AI companies to seek government protection to shield them from liability.

“That model would require severe liability protection, and there’s only one institution that can do that: the US government,” he said.

Karp has previously railed against frontier labs over the issue of data protection.

In June, Palantir published a nine-point manifesto urging companies to keep their data in-house, rather than outsourcing to institutions that Palantir paints as untrustworthy. “Transferring that data hands over access to your pre-existing winning plays and yields the means of production for new ones,” reads one point in the manifesto.

Fears about the safety of AI programs exploded into the mainstream after ex-Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon quit his job earlier this month and issued dire warnings that frontier AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.”

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay advocating for a coordinated slowdown and warning that recursive development, a process by which AI improves itself, could soon produce rogue AI agents capable of taking over the internet. That essay was signal-boosted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

In the essay, Amodei said that “all frontier labs should partner with government” to prevent incidents of misalignment among AI models. “Some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing are legally challenging, and will require government support,” he said.

President Donald Trump signaled over the weekend that he was uninterested in regulating the industry. “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 president said on social media.

To Karp, the debate is being framed incorrectly.

“This is reported as a regulation, non-regulation movement,” Karp said. “That’s actually not what this movement is.”

“The only way to deal with this kind of liability is to go to the government and say, ‘nationalize us, please,'” he added.