# Dario Amodei's AI Slowdown Plea Splits Silicon Valley and Washington > Source: > Published: 2026-09-14 01:16:13+00:00 *Anthropic's CEO says the industry needs to hit the brakes on AI. The White House says that's a fast track to losing to China, and even his fellow tech executives can't agree if he means it.* Dario Amodei wants the AI industry to slow down. Almost nobody who matters in Washington or Silicon Valley agrees on why he's saying it, or whether anyone will actually do it. On Saturday, Amodei published a roughly 3,800-word essay on his personal site called "We Must Pace the Frontier." His argument is that AI capabilities are advancing faster than anyone's ability to control them. Commercial competition between labs is making the risk worse. He points to loss-of-control scenarios, bioweapon misuse, and what he calls rogue AI agents that could try to "take over the entire internet" within six to twelve months. According to TechCrunch's Anthony Ha, who covered the essay the day it went up, Amodei's plan has three parts. Let outside evaluators sit inside Anthropic with employee-level access to training and deployment. Push for industry-wide safety standards, ideally written into law. Negotiate a tiered set of rules with non-democracies as AI capability grows. It's a big ask. Notice what's missing, though: a number. Amodei never says how much slower is enough, or what specifically triggers a pause. That gap is most of this story. Washington's answer arrived fast. [Palantir's Shyam Sankar Calls AI Doomerism a Fundraising Shtick](https://startupfortune.com/palantirs-shyam-sankar-calls-ai-doomerism-a-fundraising-shtick/) Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says AI doomerism is a "fundraising shtick" that lets frontier labs scare investors into funding them. His comments land the same week Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Barack Obama, and Bridgewater's Greg Jensen all warned about AI risk, while Trump brushed the warnings aside. - [how to avoid AI doomerism sales pitch scams](https://startupfortune.com/palantirs-shyam-sankar-calls-ai-doomerism-a-fundraising-shtick/) - [why AI safety warnings are just fundraising tactics](https://startupfortune.com/palantirs-shyam-sankar-calls-ai-doomerism-a-fundraising-shtick/) On September 13, House Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed the whole framing on CNN. "If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American," he said. The Trump administration has leaned on that same argument all year: AI is a national security race with Beijing, not a safety problem you slow down to solve. White House AI and crypto adviser David Sacks made the sharper jab. Back in August, he compared Amodei's proposed oversight system to "a DMV for AI" and accused Anthropic of angling for regulatory capture. He repeated the charge once "We Must Pace the Frontier" landed. The sharper skepticism, though, comes from inside the industry itself. At the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill on September 2, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said, "I don't believe in the doom message," a jab widely read as aimed at Anthropic, though he later softened it, adding that Amodei "is not the caricature that many people, most Americans, believe." Palantir's chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar, made a related case almost a year earlier. In an October 2025 interview with the New York Times, he called the industry's warnings about AI-driven job losses "a fundraising shtick," arguing labs "can say: my technology is so powerful, it's going to lead to mass unemployment, so you better invest in me, or you're going to be poor." Sankar wasn't talking about Amodei's September essay specifically. But the accusation underneath it is exactly the one now aimed at him: a company selling the most powerful AI in the world has an obvious incentive to make that AI sound dangerous enough to need protecting. This fight isn't new, either. Yann LeCun accused Amodei, Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis of "massive corporate lobbying" back in 2023, and Andrew Ng dismissed extinction-risk framing as "a colossally dumb idea" the same year. What's changed by 2026 is the audience. It used to be researchers arguing with researchers. Now it's a sitting House Speaker. ## What slowing down would actually require So what would actually slowing down require? Ask the people running the other labs and you get agreement without action. Sam Altman told OpenAI staff, "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier," and said the company is open to slowing frontier development, ideally alongside competitors, according to Business Standard. Elon Musk posted that "Dario is right." Demis Hassabis backed the direction publicly too. In July, roughly 1,400 researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google DeepMind signed an open letter asking the government to build tools that could "deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development," CNBC reported. None of them have actually slowed anything down. Not one model release has been delayed. Not one product roadmap has changed. Everyone agrees pacing sounds reasonable in the abstract, and nobody wants to be the first to do it for real, because in a market where OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind ship new models within weeks of each other, unilateral restraint is just a way to fall behind. Frankly, that's the tell. Until a lab puts an actual number into a safety commitment, and Congress puts one into law, "pacing the frontier" is a phrase, not a policy. **Also read:** [Stanford Research Shows AI Still Burns 1,000 Times More Energy Than Your Brain](https://startupfortune.com/stanford-research-shows-ai-still-burns-1000-times-more-energy-than-your-brain/) • [Florida AG James Uthmeier Wants AI Companies Charged as Crime Accomplices](https://startupfortune.com/florida-ag-james-uthmeier-wants-ai-companies-charged-as-crime-accomplices/) • [Shanghai AI Lab's New Model Learns to Predict Concepts, Not Just Words](https://startupfortune.com/shanghai-ai-labs-new-model-learns-to-predict-concepts-not-just-words/) [Sony Music and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over Stolen Song Lyrics](https://startupfortune.com/sony-music-and-warner-chappell-sue-anthropic-over-stolen-song-lyrics/) Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed a new copyright lawsuit against Anthropic on August 28, 2026, alleging the AI company scraped and stripped copyright data from thousands of song lyrics to train Claude. The suit, which names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally, seeks statutory damages that could reach billions of... - [how to copyright AI training data lawsuits](https://startupfortune.com/sony-music-and-warner-chappell-sue-anthropic-over-stolen-song-lyrics/) - [anthropic claude AI music copyright infringement case](https://startupfortune.com/sony-music-and-warner-chappell-sue-anthropic-over-stolen-song-lyrics/) *This article is posted in [AI News](https://startupfortune.com/category/ai/), check it out for more related stories.* ## Join the discussion [Open in the community →](/community/) Almost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away.