AI leaders rally around calls to slow things down

• AI leaders are rallying around calls for an AI slowdown.
• Dario Amodei said he had “become convinced” it was necessary.
• Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed.

The leaders of US AI labs are having a come-together moment.

After Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on Saturday that he’s “become convinced” AI needs to pace its development to avert disaster, other AI leaders quickly logged on to endorse the idea.

Most notably, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X, “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.”

Altman said OpenAI would commit, as Anthropic had earlier, to embedding third-party safety evaluators within the company with employee-level access.

SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, who rarely agrees with Altman, also backed Amodei’s proposals on Saturday, writing in an X post, “Dario is right.”

Other prominent industry leaders also chimed in.

Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said on X that his company was launching an “open alignment initiative” and asked to be included in the labs employing third-party safety evaluators.

Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher and former OpenAI and Tesla executive, also endorsed Amodei’s plan to better monitor AI’s development and ensure its safety. “I love this and really hope we can come together as an industry and make it happen,” he said on X.

Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis has yet to weigh in on Saturday. The AI leader, however, has previously called for more cooperation among AI leaders and governments.

“That calls for public policy that promotes innovation while also incentivizing responsibility and security, fosters international collaboration on key safety issues, and encourages careful consideration of how AI is deployed for the benefit of society,” he wrote in a lengthy X post in July.

This is a developing story and will be updated.