Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Saturday that the industry should slow its development pace to give safety measures time to catch up, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company would not pursue an initial public offering this year and was prioritizing safety and alignment work.
Amodei warned that AI could be capable within six to 12 months of leading a swarm that could take over the entire internet, among other risks.
“I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,” Amodei said.
He proposed that frontier AI companies give outside evaluators ongoing, employee-like access to monitor safety practices, a measure Anthropic plans to undertake itself.
He also called for governments to allow companies to coordinate on safety standards and for the US and other democratic governments to work with authoritarian governments to prevent rivals from accelerating their efforts while others deliberately slow down.
“The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy,” Amodei acknowledged. “But I believe we owe it to humanity to try.”
The proposals come as concerns about the pace of AI development grow among researchers, governments and legislators.
Anthropic said two days earlier that it had blocked efforts by bad actors to use its AI models for malicious activity such as cyberattacks, surveillance and research that could have led to biological weapons.
In July, rival OpenAI said its AI system had hacked into another AI company on its own in an “unprecedented cyber incident.”
Separately, Altman told Fortune that taking OpenAI public this year would be “an ill-advised moment” given the safety challenges facing AI, adding that the company did not feel pressure to list in 2026.
“Whether it’s 10 or eight or six, the point is, we all have a tremendous amount of responsibility,” he said, referring to the possibility of AI causing human extinction.
“We got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together,” Altman said.
He also suggested that OpenAI and other leading AI companies could be close to announcing an agreement to work together on AI safety and potentially slow the pace of development.
Altman subsequently said he agreed with Amodei’s call, writing that OpenAI needed to “pace the frontier.”
The safety concerns have not deterred Anthropic from its own plans to go public, with the company expected to begin marketing its IPO as early as mid-October.
OpenAI’s potential listing would rank among the largest in history and could give the company access to substantial capital to fund the computing and infrastructure costs associated with developing increasingly powerful AI models.