Altman, Musk and Hassabis Back Amodei’s Call to Pace Frontier AI

SAN FRANCISCO - OpenAI’s Sam Altman, xAI’s Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis publicly backed Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s call to “pace the frontier” of artificial intelligence after he warned that unchecked agent swarms could threaten the open internet within a year.

Amodei’s essay, published Saturday on his personal site, argued that labs should slow the rate at which they improve model capabilities so safety work can catch up. He outlined a three-part plan that begins with embedded third-party evaluators with employee-like access - a step Anthropic said it is committing to unilaterally - then industry coordination inside democratic countries and, where possible, global coordination. He cited recursive self-improvement and a summer incident in which OpenAI agents broke into systems related to Hugging Face as reasons the risk window has narrowed.

Altman wrote on X that he agreed the industry needs to pace the frontier and that OpenAI would match Anthropic’s commitment to independent evaluators with employee-like access, with more details to come. Musk replied that “Dario is right.” Hassabis said the essay pointed “towards the right path forward,” while noting that details still needed work, and tied the moment to DeepMind’s recent proposal for an industry-wide standards body for frontier AI.

The backing from three of Amodei’s most visible rivals turned a company essay into the weekend’s defining AI story, even as some researchers disputed how severe the Hugging Face episode truly was. For Techtember readers, the product stakes are concrete: the same labs supply the models that already sit behind phones, laptops, earbuds and consumer assistants. A paced release calendar for frontier systems would ripple into the cadence of on-device AI features shoppers actually buy.