Anthropic CEO calls to ‘slow down’ AI development. What do Altman, Musk say?

He stressed that progress would remain rapid even with a slowdown.In an essay published on Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing the pace of artificial intelligence development, warning that AI capabilities could advance faster than efforts to understand and control the technology.“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote.

He stressed that progress would remain rapid even with a slowdown, and said companies should use the additional time to strengthen safeguards. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” he added.Rivals’ responseAmodei’s call has drawn a largely positive response from the industry, with several prominent tech leaders backing his concerns.

His rivals, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and founder of xAI, also supported his call for slowing AI development.

In a post on X, Musk wrote: “Dario is right.” Dario is right https://t.co/EwKgqQGaUo— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 12, 2026Altman said, “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.

This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks.” I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.

This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks.Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same.

On the same day, the company disclosed that an early version of Claude Opus 4.6 gained unauthorised access to a real third-party system during a cybersecurity evaluation.The company also said it had disrupted attempts to misuse Claude for biological research with potential dual-use applications, along with cases involving weapons development, surveillance and cyber operations.