The biggest names in artificial intelligence seldom see eye to eye. That is why their growing agreement on one issue has drawn so much attention.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI founder Elon Musk and other prominent technology leaders have argued in recent days that the pace of AI development should slow. Their shared concern emerged after an Anthropic researcher resigned and issued a stark warning about the risks the technology could pose to humanity.
Yet any coordinated effort to rein in artificial intelligence faces major barriers, including fierce competition at home and abroad, the pressure to generate profits and opposition from President Donald Trump.
Even so, the debate could push the industry to reconsider how it defines success, said Nick Reese, a former director of emerging technology policy at the Department of Homeland Security and an adjunct professor at New York University.
“What if we considered success in AI the same way that we consider success for airlines? On time and haven’t had a crash in who knows how long,” Reese said. “We don’t tolerate commercial airline crashes, but we do tolerate significant AI failures.”
What tech leaders want an AI slowdown to look like
In principle, leading AI startups could choose to slow their model development at any point. In practice, however, recent breakthroughs have been driven in part by a race to build increasingly powerful systems — a competition encouraged by a White House determined to ensure the United States maintains its advantage over China. Anthropic and OpenAI are also moving toward potentially record-setting stock market debuts, although OpenAI has said it will not go public this year as it continues its safety work.
As a result, many of the proposals from AI companies rely on cooperation among competitors and, to some degree, government oversight.
Amodei recently published a detailed essay outlining his ideas for slowing the development of advanced AI.
One proposal would require frontier AI labs — companies developing the most advanced models — to provide independent external evaluators with “ongoing, employee-like access.” Those teams would have their own offices, security badges and company-issued laptops, allowing them to observe safety procedures from inside the organizations.
Anthropic is “unilaterally committing” to that measure now, Amodei wrote. Altman described the proposal as a “great idea” on social media and said OpenAI would adopt it as well.
Altman has also said he supports a “federal framework” establishing safety requirements for advanced AI. But he emphasized that OpenAI does not need to wait for new laws or an antitrust exemption before taking action on AI safety.
Amodei’s proposal further urges government regulation and international coordination. He called for frontier AI companies to work with the U.S. government and other democratic nations to develop “common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress.”
The plan also envisions cooperation between the United States and “authoritarian governments,” though Amodei acknowledged that such diplomacy would be difficult. He specifically pointed to the challenge of securing China’s participation.
Amodei described several possible levels of international agreement. The most attainable, he said, would prohibit “certain narrow and obviously dangerous uses of AI,” such as creating biological weapons or enabling users to produce them. A more ambitious agreement would require the U.S. and rival nations to test AI models before release for dangers involving cybersecurity, biological threats and other risks, potentially under the supervision of a global standards organization.
Still harder would be to set a “speed limit” on AI models that can develop improved versions of themselves on their own, known as recursive self-improvement.
“Slowing the rate from ‘extremely fast’ to ‘only somewhat fast’ gives up relatively little strategic advantage, while potentially greatly improving safety,” Amodei wrote.
He drew an analogy to Cold War-era treaties in which “capping the number of missiles limited the potential for destruction while preserving each country’s deterrent.”
Amodei said the most difficult proposal to implement would be a “full pacing, or even ‘pause,’” whereby participating governments agree to substantially limit the overall rate of AI development.
Writing on social media, Altman said the “pacing” of AI development does not mean stopping. AI progress will continue to be rapid, Altman said on X. “But it should be slower than it otherwise could be; interventions like safety cases and monitoring have significant costs.”
“Pacing will be well worth this cost,” he said, adding that “no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness.”
Questions swirl about AI slowdown’s feasibility
While experts said the sense of agreement across the industry is promising, there are many unanswered questions.
A slowdown is possible “in theory,” said Sandra Wachter, professor of technology and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute.
But in practice, “it would require substantial coordination and cooperation between companies and governments across countries,” something she deems “highly unrealistic” due to “the current state of the world.”
Options for promoting a slowdown, she said, include governments doing more to hold AI companies responsible for the risks posed by their technology and pursuing regulation that limits their access to electricity, water and other resources that power data centers.
The idea of embedding external evaluators inside companies has been mostly well-received by the industry, but some critics questioned how independent the assessors could be and how the evaluation standards would be drawn up. The result could be even more concentration of power, Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of the Canadian AI lab Cohere, wrote in response to Amodei’s essay.
“A handful of the most powerful labs based in one country would agree on shared standards and the limits to how fast the technology should advance,” Gomez said.
He also pushed back against Amodei’s idea to have the U.S. government give frontier labs waivers to bypass antitrust restrictions.
“If this is the most consequential technology in human history, then the rules for it cannot be written by a small group of commercially aligned companies behind an antitrust waiver,” Gomez said.
Elham Tabassi, the director of the AI and Emerging Technology Initiative and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said until the measures companies are committing to are solidified and made public, having independent auditors would be a “voluntarily-provided, company-controlled” move.
Tabassi said it’s crucial AI companies continue to invest in developing “scientifically valid” ways of testing and measuring their models as they aim for increased safety. Without this, regulation won’t hold as much power, she said.
Trump resistance, pressure to beat China stand in the way
The Trump administration has long favored a light-touch approach to the AI industry in hopes that innovation would flourish and that AI development in the U.S. would surpass China.
The competition between American and Chinese AI companies has been likened to an arms race, which experts said is not conducive to collaboration. That creates “conditions where now we have this existential adversary,” Reese said.
Still, some industry leaders remain “cautiously hopeful” about AI development moving in a more safety-minded direction, said Zahra Timsah, the co-founder and CEO of governance platform i-GENTIC AI.
“Within days, you have CEOs that are competing — all of them, all of a sudden, found common ground. You have senators from both parties that started to advance different forms of oversight,” Timsah said.
“It’s receiving attention, but attention is not the same as implementation. Will it really work? I don’t know.”
