Is there any truth to the AI doom talk?

Dario Amodei runs Anthropic, the company behind Claude, which this column has used in more weeks than any other tool. On 12 September he published an essay of nearly 4,000 words titled “We Must Pace the Frontier.” The central sentence is short: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.” Sam Altman of OpenAI replied that he agreed the industry needs to pace the frontier, called the essay’s main proposal a great idea and said OpenAI would do the same.

Elon Musk wrote three words: “Dario is right.” Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind said the direction was correct. On 8 September, a pretraining researcher named Jacob Coxon had resigned from Anthropic on X after four months there and three years at OpenAI before that, writing that the labs “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” and that the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. If you run a business that adopted these tools in the past year, this is the week the people who sell them asked, in public, for more time to understand what they have built.

That deserves a plainer reading than either the doom headlines or the shrug it will get in most offices. Three steps: outside evaluators, common checkpoints, globalcoordination. A proposal about frontier research, not a pause in the tools businesses use today.

(Branded graphic by PGH Consulting, LLC) What the essay actually asks for The essay is not a call to stop, and it is not a call to stop using AI. It is a three-step proposal about how fast the most capable models should be improved. Step one is the only part Anthropic has committed to on its own.

Outside evaluators will be given what the essay calls employee-like access: desks, badges, laptops and permissions close to those of the company’s internal risk teams, with the right to publish what they find without Anthropic editing the conclusions. Step two asks frontier companies in democratic countries to agree common safety checkpoints, with government support to get past competition law. Step three is coordination with authoritarian governments, chiefly China, which Amodei told CBS’s Sunday Morning the next day is the toughest dilemma in the plan: what happens if they choose not …