Anthropic CEO’s plan raises concerns for Qwen, Llama, Mistral builders

Dario Amodei wants to pump the brakes on AI, and he’s drawn up a detailed blueprint for how to do it. The Anthropic CEO published a 3,800-word essay on September 12 outlining a three-step plan to slow the pace of AI capability development, with specific focus on open-weight models from China and the distillation practices that let weaker systems piggyback on more advanced ones. The proposal has already attracted endorsements from Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Demis Hassabis. The three-step playbook Amodei’s framework rests on three pillars, each escalating in ambition. The first calls for granting independent evaluators like METR deep access to frontier AI models for safety verification. Step two pushes for industry-wide safety standards adopted across AI labs in democratic nations. This isn’t a voluntary code of conduct. Amodei is describing a coordinated framework where labs would submit to mandatory safety testing regardless of whether their models are proprietary or open-weight. The third and most ambitious piece involves global coordination on AI technology regulation. Combined with stricter chip export controls targeting China, this would create a regime where access to cutting-...