Anthropic's CEO Calls for an AI Slowdown, Starting With His Own Company

Dario Amodei pledged to give third-party evaluators permanent, employee-level access to Anthropic's systems, days after a researcher quit warning AI could cause human extinction by 2030.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei issued a public appeal for the AI industry to slow down, laying out a three-part plan in an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier and committing Anthropic to the first step unilaterally: giving third-party evaluators permanent, employee-level access to its systems so they can independently verify safety measures, report incidents, and assess model alignment during training. The move follows a turbulent week for the company. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit publicly, warning that AI could precipitate human extinction by 2030 and that neither Anthropic nor his former employer OpenAI was acting responsibly, accusing both of racing toward self-improving superintelligence while gambling with human lives. An Anthropic spokesperson responded that the company has always been transparent that AI carries both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks, and said it's building models with some of the industry's strongest safeguards. Amodei's move is notable precisely because it comes from inside the company usually cited as one of AI's most safety-conscious labs, and because it commits to a concrete, externally verifiable action rather than just more public reassurance, at a moment when public trust in the industry's own safety promises is visibly eroding.