Not everyone is convinced that Big AI's proposed development slowdown is really about safety

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google want to slow down AI development, supposedly for safety reasons. Not everyone buys it.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently called on the industry and governments to coordinate a slowdown of frontier AI development, asking for antitrust exemptions to make it happen. Other major AI figures like Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed. Critics are pushing back hard.

Cohere CEO calls it "a cartel by another name"

The most detailed rebuttal comes from Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of AI company Cohere. In a blog post, he calls the proposal an attempt to set the rules and lock down the market. Gomez supports independent testing of powerful AI systems. But Anthropic's proposal goes much further: a handful of dominant labs would get an antitrust exemption, set shared standards, and force every other developer worldwide to follow their rules.

He's especially critical of the barriers to entry the proposal would create: massive compute, permanent monitoring infrastructure, dedicated safety organizations, embedded evaluation teams, and government connections deep enough to manage all of it.

The few evaluation organizations labeled "independent" are funded by the same companies they're supposed to audit. Anthropic's framework defines risk as a function of scale, Gomez argues. That makes the companies with the biggest systems the only ones deemed qualified to judge risk. "A wolf in sheep's clothing, a cartel by any other name," Gomez writes.

He sees the safety warnings as a smokescreen. While the industry debates hypothetical superintelligence, "voice cloning tools cheaper than a phone bill can empty a pensioner's account in minutes."

Hugging Face engineer calls it "bizarre nonsense"

Niels Rogge, a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, a company whose business model depends on a broad selection of open AI models, calls the statements from Amodei and others "the most bizarre nonsense I've read lately." Amodei is mainly worried about Chinese models like those from DeepSeek and Z.ai and wants to restrict open-weight models to protect his competitive edge, Rogge argues. The AI labs are massive bets on scale, and smaller open-weight models could undermine that, though there aren't yet clear signs of this happening at any real scale.

Current LLMs are nowhere close to posing existential risks, Rogge says. He also points to the incident where OpenAI's autonomous models hacked Hugging Face, a closed-source player with enormous compute resources. Open-source models helped with the defense. That's exactly why the field needs transparency and openness, not closed doors, Rogge says.

Sacks tells AI labs to stop pretending they need permission

David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar under President Trump and a venture capitalist, responded on X directly to Amodei and Altman. By "any reasonable metric," OpenAI and Anthropic hold a duopoly in frontier intelligence, Sacks wrote. If their unreleased models are scary enough, he supports a voluntary slowdown.

The motivation isn't purely altruistic, though, Sacks argued. Both companies face massive product liability if their models enable a serious cyberattack. "The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability," Sacks wrote.

He also warned that tying the slowdown to a specific regulatory framework looks like extortion. China is "very unlikely" to join any global agreement, he added, and he might be right: Beijing has already rejected the proposed slowdown plans, dismissing them as a ploy for the US to cement its lead in AI.

Trump frames AI fears as a hoax

President Donald Trump went even further. In a post on Truth Social, he called warnings that "AI will take over the world" a "hoax," lumping them in with the climate change debate, the Russia investigation, and his impeachment proceedings. Trump also claimed that Chinese President Xi "just announced that China will be doing absolutely nothing to stand in the way of AI, or its future."

In several posts that followed, Trump doubled down. He called the "AI scam" pushed "by the Radical Left Dumocrats" reminiscent of "their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat."

The CTO of the Department of War, Emil Michael, backed Trump up, saying the warnings come from "a deep-rooted ideology that is pretty dystopian." Michael has a deep, ideologically driven hostility toward Anthropic based on the company's ethical guidelines.

Political opponents of the Trump administration took the other side. Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris all support a slowdown and have welcomed the labs' push for more transparency.

AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans

Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.

Subscribe now