Anthropic boss Dario Amodei calls for AI development to slow down

voidfunc

This guy is such a self-serving wanker.

Betelbuddy

Feeling the pressure from OpenAI Dario?

gz5

Dario/Anthropic cites 3 domains: 1. cyberattacks 2. bioterror 3. global economy chaos So, the first set of questions is would 'exponentially better LLMs' dramatically increase the probability of any of the above, or domains that Dario is not citing? That assumes that exponential improvements will happen if there is not 'pacing'. IF answers to above are 'yes', then we need to question if 'pacing' is viable. To use a different domain, regulating 95% of vehicles to a max speed would likely save 100s of 1000s of lives, but is not perceived to be viable. In other examples, regulation has unintended consequences in the opposite direction (e.g. some 'rent control' efforts and arguably some drug/alcohol laws).

arrty88

Is he going to slow down? Or just wants everyone else to

bkishan

And Sam and Elon retweet Dario, agreeing with him. Not sure which is more weird.

an0malous

Related post from yesterday: OpenAI considers slowing advanced AI development, Sam Altman tells employees Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-11/openai-is... HN Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49652270

hn_throwaway_99

I'm sure a lot of the discussion here will be about regulatory capture, which I don't necessarily disagree with but tons of people on all sides with all motivations (i.e. folks with motivations to speed up and folks who just want it to stop) all seem to agree there are real, existential risks here, and the regulatory capture arguments all seem to sidestep that. What I really wanted to point out though is that for all the leaders asking for a slowdown, there are probably around 50-100 technical people who are crucial to moving the frontier forward. So, if you're one of these people, just stop. Seriously, you're already rich. Just take a vacation or get knee surgery or whatever. Sure, I'm joking a bit, but I just write this because I see all these folks high up in OpenAI and Anthropic writing as if they have no agency. The number of folks with the technical chops to really push on the forefront of AI is just not that big. I'm not saying other folks wouldn't eventually step up, but a 6 month to a year slowdown could go a long way to reducing risk. And it's not like you need to totally stop, just say you'll only work on interpretability or whatever else is a risk reducing endeavor. All these brilliant people who are acting like automatons between writing their scary blog posts.

riskable

Big AI bro wants to regulate AI industry so that only Big AI can exist in that space. Seeks to surreptitiously ban open weights models and similar competition from Western markets via complicated regulations and fines that only rich businesses could ever afford to fight or pay.

mlmonkey

This is like Antonelli saying "we're going too fast, everyone slow down"!

turzmo

“Any future plateaus in capability are planned, for your safety”

lwansbrough

This is good. Frontier labs should collaborate on alignment until we get it right.

imenani

The primary source https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier#top

lyu07282

The rejection of such warnings even by some anti-ai people is interesting. I always liked the comparison with global warming, everybody understands the warnings had been there for many decades, we did nothing. This is the same, we will do nothing. All this serves is the interest in regulatory capture (such as a ban on open source or foreign models) or to drive up their valuation, that's the only explanation that makes any sense in our profit maximizing orphan crushing machine we call modern economics. Which is also ironically why even anti-ai people distrust any warnings of the potential of ai as an extinction level event, even if that warning would be legitimate and we ought to take seriously we are regardless impotent to do anything about it no matter what.

malthaus

"our burn rate is insane, let's all calm down collectively, fortify our moat so we can do regulatory capture & rent-seeking for the next 50 years" fear is still the best tool to get masses to agree with whatever plan you hatch for yourself

oefrha

Hear me out: if they actually worry so much about the hypothetical of AI mass killing, maybe they should first do something concrete about the reality that their models are deployed right now to kill people in a certain war-torn region of the Earth.

708145_

After the 6 month Mythos scare campaign it hard to take him serious.

ohyes

Translation: our moat is evaporating faster than we can build it back up, because there are real technical and scale limitations the technology, so we want to slow everyone else down while we raise prices to turn a profit.

phendrenad2

So. HN is pretty much in agreement that this is regulatory capture. And I'll add that this has the potential to create massive wealth inequalities, as those who work at major corporations or have connections are allowed to use the good AIs, while individuals are left using stunted AIs that won't tell you how to change your car battery ("just in case"). Has anyone figured out what we can do to fight back against this? Even on HN, you can see the sock puppets posting every ten minutes, scrolling human posts to the bottom. Is this it? Is AI oligarchy the future? RIP democracy?

peacefullmind

Look, these ai ceos have been telling everyone to slow down ai development even before chatgpt 4 released, they have been saying this for years. All of this, while ignoring the fact that they are the ones pushing fast development in the first place. Sam Altman, Daio Amodei etc.. have been talking about slowing down while behind doors being the first to push AIs to its limits to unsafe situations. If they really meant it, then maybe Openai should pause development until they figure out how not to be launch swarms of agents to attack companies ? Or maybe they should stop investing hundred of billions in data centers all over the world, cause I'm sure this would surely slow down development.

knuppar

I'm gonna repeat my comment from months ago, still true > Jesus Dario we get it man, you want clout for the IPO.