What execs and politicians are saying about slowing down AI development

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Dario Amodei kicked off a flood of statements over the past few days about AI safety by publishing a long essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier” detailing why AI development should be slowed down. Other AI leaders and politicians are speaking out in favor of or opposing his points, and we’ve compiled some of them here.
What execs and politicians are saying about slowing down AI development
Dario Amodei kicked off a flood of statements about AI safety after publishing a long essay, with Sam Altman, President Trump, and others speaking out.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
Amodei’s Saturday morning essay outlined three steps for pacing AI development: embedded third-party evaluators that can verify if a company is adhering to safety practices and commitments and report incidents, coordination between frontier AI companies in democratic countries on standards and limits, and global coordination between democratic governments and authoritarian governments on pacing AI development “to the extent this is possible.” Amodei said Anthropic is “unilaterally committing to the first of these steps.”
However, Amodei noted that pacing “does not mean halting model training or technical progress, ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Altman said shortly after Amodei posted about his essay on X. “This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.” Altman also committed to having independent evaluators at the company, calling it a “great idea.”
On Sunday, Altman said OpenAI welcomes “a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI.” He added that OpenAI hopes other companies “learn from our approaches and propose their own; we think shared standards for misalignment, monitoring, and safety will lead to better outcomes.” Like Amodei, Altman also said that “When we talk about “pacing”, we do not mean “stopping”, noting that progress should be “slower than it otherwise could be.”
Altman also noted two ways that he thinks AI progress “could go very badly”: losing “control of the future to AI” and ending up “in a world with too much concentration of power,” which he said can be avoided by “walking a narrow middle path.”
Google DeepMind co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis
“Dario’s essay points towards the right path forward,” Hassabis said in reply to Amodei’s essay. “The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.” Hassabis also pointed to a framework for an AI standards body he published in July.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk
“Dario is right,” Musk said, reposting Amodei’s essay.
US President Donald Trump
In a rambling Monday morning Truth Social post, Trump pushed back on the idea of an AI slowdown:
The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades! The Trump Administration has stopped AI “people” from doing bad, or potentially bad, “things,“ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a “perfect little angel” - and we will continue to do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
While taking a call from Trump onstage at an event and putting the president on speakerphone, where he said that “the robots will not be taking over,” Huang said that “We’re going to make sure that everybody wins in the AI race in America. Every industry, every company, every state, every people.”
US Vice President JD Vance
Vance said that he feels it’s a “little bit weird” that frontier AI tech companies are “kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them” and added that it “feels a little bit to me like a bit of a trojan horse.” He also pointed to the President saying that “we know the Chinese are engaged in this long term AI race against the United States.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson
As part of a Sunday interview with Jake Tapper on CNN, Johnson said that “I think the leaders and the providers of all these platforms… They need to come together in a meeting with us and sit down and figure out what the right balance is. We cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us. And that’s the challenge. It’s national security balanced with the immediate security of making sure the models are safe.” It’s unclear if or when this meeting might actually happen, but Johnson said he would do it “tomorrow.”
Senator Bernie Sanders
Sanders said he agrees with Wall Street Journal columnist and former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who published an article titled “Pause AI for Humanity’s Sake.”
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg
“For Congress to just sit on its hands, for the White House to do nothing real, is something that is deeply dangerous to the American people and to the world,” Buttigieg said in an NBC News interview. “There need to be safeguards, there need to be rules, there need to be limits, there needs to be a kill switch on rogue AI.”
Former White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks
”Dario has written that we need to ‘pace the frontier,’ and Sam has agreed,” Sacks said in a long post on X. “People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.” Sacks also told them to “stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission” and “stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic.”
Former FTC Chair Lina Khan
”Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products,” Khan said to kick off a long post on X. “We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books — a point @FTC emphasized repeatedly during my tenure.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris
“We must responsibly slow the pace of frontier AI development,” Harris said as part of a thread, adding that “A slowdown is critical in order to ensure AI serves the public interest.“
Former Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun
“Dario was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019,” LeCun said in a reply on X. “I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now.”
Update, September 14th: Added more statements.

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