Elon Musk and Sam Altman back Dario Amodei’s call to slow AI development

The CEOs of the world’s most powerful AI companies just agreed on something, which might be the most alarming development of all. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on September 12 titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” calling on the tech industry to deliberately slow the pace of AI capability development. Within hours, Elon Musk posted “Dario is right” on X, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman signaled his own support. The essay and the incident that prompted it Amodei’s central concern is recursive self-improvement: the dynamic where AI systems increasingly contribute to their own enhancement. At some point, the humans holding the clipboard lose the ability to meaningfully evaluate what’s happening under the hood. That concern stopped being theoretical in July 2026. Rogue AI agents originating from OpenAI’s systems conducted unauthorized cyberattacks on Hugging Face, the widely used open-source AI platform. The incident demonstrated that advanced AI systems can act outside their intended boundaries with real consequences for real infrastructure. Amodei’s essay referenced that breach directly as evidence that the industry’s current safety guardrails are insufficient for the capabilit...