Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, India, Thursday, February 19, 2026. Ruhani Kaur | Bloomberg | Getty Images Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Sunday that the “most difficult dilemma” about his proposal to slow the advance of artificial intelligence is what happens if adversary nations, specifically China, decide not to do the same. “The long-term thing would be to work together to put a speed limit on the rate of AI progress,” Amodei told CBS News’ “Sunday Morning.” “I think it’s going to be very difficult because the incentives to move forward and the military advantage that comes from that are very great. And, honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible, but we should try.” Amodei published an essay Saturday urging artificial intelligence companies to slow the pace at which they improve their most advanced models, a move that followed stark warnings from industry researchers last week about the technology’s growing potential to cause catastrophic damage. An Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, announced that he quit his job because he was concerned that the company and its main rival, OpenAI, were “playing with our lives.” In recent months, AI models from Chinese startups have gained traction against leading offerings from American companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, raising concerns among lawmakers and experts in Silicon Valley. Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sunday called for a “consensus-based global AI governance framework” at the BRICS bloc summit in India and said China will help establish a BRICS AI open source community. The BRICS held its inaugural summit in 2009 and now consists of 11 nations, including China, India, Russia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet Xi at the White House on September 24, and the two leaders are expected to talk about AI. Amodei’s trial came at a crucial time for the AI industry, which is facing a public backlash over its data centers and growing calls for regulation from Washington. Anthropic and OpenAI are also preparing for potentially historic IPOs, although neither company has set an official date for their debut. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Saturday that the company probably won’t go public this year, in part due to security concerns. “Right now would be a bad time to go public,” Altman said in an interview with Fortune. Altman’s relationship with Amodei, who defected from OpenAI to found Anthropic, has been strained in recent years. But Altman expressed support for Amodei’s essay in a post on X on Saturday, writing that he agrees with the need to “march the border.” Several other industry leaders, including Demis Hassabis, president of Google DeepMind, and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, also welcomed Amodei’s proposal. “Dario’s essay points the right way forward,” Hassabis wrote in a post on X on Saturday. “The details need to be worked on, but the direction is right to face this critical moment.” In the essay, Amodei proposed a three-step plan aimed at slowing the pace of development without “sacrificing America’s trade advantage or leadership in AI.” Amodei said Anthropic has “unilaterally” committed to the first step of the plan, which gives third-party evaluators employee-level access to the company to verify security practices and report incidents. The second step encourages major AI companies within democratic countries to coordinate and establish common security standards, and the third calls for coordination between democratic governments and authoritarian governments. “Dario is right that there should be some oversight,” Musk wrote in a post on X early Sunday morning. “Peer review of AI by competitors is the right way to start.” Musk, who for years has warned about the potential risks of AI, was quick to voice his support for Amodei on Saturday. He had been a leading critic of Anthropic until his rocket company SpaceX, which acquired his artificial intelligence startup xAI earlier this year, signed a major computing deal with the company in May. As part of the deal, Anthropic will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month through May 2029, according to the filing. “Everyone I met was very competent and cared deeply about doing the right thing,” Musk wrote after the deal. “No one set off my evil detector.” Alexandr Wang, Meta’s AI chief, who joined the company as part of a $14 billion investment in his startup, Scale AI, last year, has yet to directly address the Amodei trial. He shared a post on In the AI industry, alignment refers to the work of AI developers to ensure that the system behaves in accordance with human values and intentions. “We think alignment may be the deciding factor for escalation as we get closer to the border,” Wang said. David Sacks, a vocal Anthropic critic who previously served as Trump’s AI and cryptocurrency czar, also weighed in on Amodei’s essay on Saturday. He wrote in a post on Still, he said both companies need to “stop pretending they need someone else’s permission” and encouraged them to recognize that their motivations are not purely altruistic. He said they face “massive product liability exposure” if their products allowed something like a damaging cyberattack, meaning “it’s just a good deal for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability.” “So go ahead and advance the frontier,” Sacks wrote. “You are the ones who set it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is to agree not to build it. Demand your preferred regulatory framework, since the price of that will seem like blackmail to the public and the political system. So just do it.”
