Washington DC; September 2026: Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic has warned flagging that the artificial intelligence industry should slow its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Without it, Dario Amodei warned, AI could be capable within 06 to 12 months of leading a swarm that could take over the entire internet, among other risks.
Amodei also offered a plan in a post on his website to increase checks on the industry, one part of which he said Anthropic is undertaking by itself already. The others would require co-ordination among the broad industry and with governments around the world, including authoritarian ones. He said: "I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong".
Both Elon Musk, who runs xAI, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in posts on X that they agree with Amodei. "This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks", Altman said.
The stakes are high, even as some critics dismissed earlier warnings as hype to gin up excitement. Anthropic, an AI research and safety company, said two days earlier that it blocked efforts by bad actors to use its AI models for malicious activity such as cyberattacks, surveillance and research that could have led to biological weapons. In July this year (2026), rival OpenAI shook the industry after saying its AI system hacked into another AI company on its own in an "unprecedented cyber incident".
Amodei's post comes only a few days after one of Anthropic's researchers announced he's resigning over concerns that Anthropic and its competitors are not acting responsibly in AI development. Another former Anthropic employee, Joe Benton, had briefed a section of the media house’s last Friday (11th September) that he left his job as part of a safety team "to hold AI companies accountable" and that humanity "may not survive this transition. Many of the people I know who work on safety research at AI companies want to do what is right for the world", Benton said in his posting, while further elaborating, "But they feel their companies are trapped in a race to build superintelligence: either they stop and other, less conscientious people take their place; or, they continue, and risk participating in enormous harm themselves".
To help rein in such risks, Amodei suggested that all companies at the frontier of AI commit to giving "ongoing, employee-like access" to a team of outside evaluators, who can monitor safety practices. He said Anthropic already plans to do so itself, including offering desks in its offices, access badges and company laptops.
The other parts of Amodei's suggested plan may be more difficult to implement:
·which has urged the Donald Trump’s government to potentially issue waivers that would allow American AI companies to co-ordinate and set safety standards without running afoul of antitrust laws.
·Similarly, another asks the U.S. and other democratic governments to try to co-ordinate with authoritarian governments, so that companies from China and other countries don't accelerate their efforts when US rivals are intentionally pacing theirs.
Amodei has reiterated that: "The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy. But I believe we owe it to humanity to try". Altman said in his post that third-party evaluators with employee level access is a ‘great idea’, and pledge to introduce such a measure in the near future.
Team Maverick.
