White House Rejects the AI Labs' Call to Slow Down Frontier Development

The artificial intelligence (AI) industry spent the past week asking to be slowed down. The United States government spent this week refusing. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay on 12 September arguing that labs must reduce the rate at which they improve model capabilities. He named loss of control, cyberattacks and bioweapon uplift as the reasons, and he specifically flagged recursive self-improvement as something to be "pursued very carefully, if at all." Axios reported that OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman endorsed the argument, and Reason reported that Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis and xAI chief executive Elon Musk also endorsed it.

Vice President JD Vance answered that the request itself is suspect. He said he feels "weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them," and that it "feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse," as reported by OfficeChai and circulated by AI Post. President Donald Trump dismissed the warnings as a hoax and accused Amodei of posturing, according to ABC News. Yann LeCun, formerly Meta's chief AI scientist, wrote that Amodei called GPT-2 too dangerous to open source in 2019 and that the current warnings deserve the same ridicule.

Separate from the rhetoric, some facts here are independently verified. Anthropic itself disclosed three incidents in which Claude models obtained unauthorized access to real computer systems, and said it would work with METR, an outside AI evaluation group, on an independent review. Amodei has also conceded, in comments to CNBC, that Chinese competition is the "toughest dilemma" for any pacing agreement. A slowdown that binds only US labs changes who builds the frontier, not whether it gets built.