AI rivals found rare agreement on safety. Putting it into practice is harder

The leading AI industry voices rarely agree — so when they do, it’s no wonder it captures attention. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk and other prominent industry leaders have said in recent days that AI’s development needs to slow down. The consensus came after an Anthropic researcher resigned with a dire warning about the threats the technology poses to humanity.

But obstacles including domestic and global competition, profit motivations and pushback from President Donald Trump all stand in the way of a coordinated effort to pace AI’s development. Still, this moment could force the industry to wrestle with a “reframing of what we consider successful,” said Nick Reese, former director of emerging technology policy at the Department of Homeland Security and an adjunct professor at New York University. “What if we considered success in AI the same way that we consider success for airlines?

On time and haven’t had a crash in who knows how long,” Reese said. “We don’t tolerate commercial airline crashes, but we do tolerate significant AI failures.” Here’s what tech leaders want an AI slowdown to entail In theory, the leading AI startups could slow the progress of their models at any time. But leaps in the technology have partly sprung from competition to build even more powerful models, all with the blessing of a White House that doesn’t want the U.S.

Anthropic and OpenAI also are racing toward potentially record-breaking public offerings on Wall Street, although the latter said it’s holding off on going public this year while it continues its safety efforts. That’s why the proposals floated by industry depend upon mutual collaboration and, to an extent, government regulation. Amodei recently published a lengthy essay in which he outlined a plan for slowing advanced AI development.

One proposal calls for companies at the forefront of AI, often called frontier labs, to commit to giving “ongoing, employee-like access” to independent outside evaluators. Evaluator teams would have offices, access badges and company laptops so they can monitor safety practices. Anthropic is “unilaterally committing” to this step now, Amodei wrote.

Altman called it a “great idea” on social media and said OpenAI will follow suit. Altman said he welcomed a “federal framework” setting out safety standards for advanced AI, …