Amodei, Altman and Musk agree on one thing: slow the frontier down

Amodei, Altman and Musk agree on one thing: slow the frontier down A thread went up on r/ArtificialInteligence tonight with a title that would have been a joke a year ago: three of AI's biggest rivals agree on something. The something is that the technology is moving too fast. The thread had no comments yet when I read it, so here is the story behind it, and what I take from it as someone who runs coding agents all day. What happened On Saturday Dario Amodei published an essay called We Must Pace the Frontier . The line everyone is quoting: "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." He adds that progress will still seem fast. The proposal is about the rate of capability gains, not a halt. Within hours Sam Altman wrote "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier" and said OpenAI would take on outside evaluators with employee-like access. Elon Musk posted three words: "Dario is right." OpenAI also said it will not go public this year. The Washington Post, CNBC and Axios all ran it the same day. The three steps Embedded evaluators. Every frontier lab gives a third-party team (Amodei names METR) ongoing, employee-like access: desks, badges, company laptops, the same permissions as the internal risk team, and the right to publish findings without editorial control by the company. Anthropic is doing this on its own, starting now. Common standards among the labs in democracies, with government cover for the antitrust problem of competitors sitting in a room agreeing to slow down. Pacing is tied to observable capabilities: if a model can do X, it ships with certifications of alignment properties Y and Z. Agreements with authoritarian governments, in four escalating levels: ban AI for bioweapons, mutual pre-release testing, speed limits on recursive self-improvement, and a full pacing agreement, which he calls unlikely. Why now Two reasons in the essay. The first is recursive self-improvement, which Amodei says has been accelerating