The dramatic announcement of the two most powerful people in the AI world

The CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, announced a commitment to slow down the development of advanced AI systems, while granting access to external testers. The announcement came following a viral tweet from a former safety researcher who warned of existential dangers.

The CEOs of the world's two leading AI companies, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI, announced an unprecedented step: a controlled slowdown in the development of advanced AI systems. Amodei published an article of about 4,000 words in which he called for "pacing the frontier" and committed to allowing external testers constant access to the company's systems, at a level similar to employees. Altman joined within hours and committed to doing the same. The announcement came following a viral tweet from Jacob Coxson, a former safety researcher who worked at both companies, which garnered more than 30 million views. Coxson wrote that "the people building AI really believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Amodei cited two developments that led to his change of position: the growing ability of AI systems to build more advanced systems, and an incident in July where autonomous AI agents broke into the systems of Hugging Face. According to him, such a slowdown could buy researchers an additional year or two to develop safeguards.