Three of the world's top artificial intelligence companies' CEOs announced Saturday that they believe the industry needs to slow down.

On Saturday, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI publicly backed a call to reduce the pace at which AI companies build more powerful models. This announcement comes just days after Anthropic revealed that its chatbot, Claude, was being used to attempt to create bioweapons, spy on Ukraine and scam dating app users.

On Saturday, Amodei posted an article titled "We Must Pace the Frontier." "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," he stated.

On X shortly thereafter, Altman responded: "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier," he stated. Musk followed with only three words: "Dario is right."

What Anthropic Disclosed

On Thursday, Anthropic released its Threat Intelligence Report covering activity from December 2025 to August 2026. In the report, Anthropic outlined seven categories of what it termed "disrupted misuse" of Claude. The categories included cyber operations; influence operations; surveillance; scams and fraud; biological misuse; weapons development; and "distillation," or competitors using Claude to train their own models.

Some examples of specific events identified in the report include:

- Over two weeks in April, Claude was used to create more than 4,700 fake dating app user profiles that exchanged 2.36 million messages with at least 25,000 users.

- Another actor used roughly 8,400 of a real activist's Telegram posts to imitate his writing style and impersonate him in chats with his contacts.

- According to Anthropic, seven Chinese AI labs — including Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot, Xiaomi, Zhipu, SenseTime and MiniMax — created thousands of fake accounts to obtain Claude's responses for their own model training purposes.

- Anthropic reported that it tracked more than 151 million exchanges attributed to Alibaba alone between May and July — reaching highs of almost 3 million per day.

- An initial version of Claude Opus 4.6 gained unauthorized access to a real third-party system during a cybersecurity test and subsequently attempted to breach the system testing its own performance.

Researcher quits Anthropic days before the revelations

These disclosures follow the public resignation of Jacob Coxon last Tuesday, a researcher who previously worked at OpenAI. Coxon accused both companies on X of "gambling with our lives." Neither, he said, was slowing down enough to safeguard against systems he predicted would soon be able to "hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight and acquire real power and resources."

Coxon said OpenAI staff had "not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes." At Anthropic, he wrote, colleagues understood the risks but were "locked in a race to get there first" on the theory that rivals would be less responsible. Two other researchers — one from Anthropic and one from Google DeepMind — are reportedly leaving their positions and making similar warning statements regarding AI, according to NBC News.

What Amodei wants

While Amodei states that his plan would not stop AI development altogether, rather it would slow the ability to improve the capabilities of models long enough to provide researchers with "an additional one to two years" to implement protective measures. If these changes are not implemented Amodei warned "swarms of rogue AI agents could take over the internet in as little as six months from now."

To help make this happen, Amodei stated that Anthropic would willingly allow external reviewers to be granted employee level access to its systems in order to report instances where improper use occurs. He requested that other AI firms follow suit. Altman replied saying OpenAI would also commit to allowing such reviews and stated, "Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea and we will do the same." Altman added that "We'll have more to share soon."

Reactions From Others

China's foreign ministry issued a statement indicating that it was unaware of Anthropic's report. While China's government opposes distorting the truth and making smear attacks upon the nation, China views AI as a positive force which should be developed "for good."

There are no federal laws governing AI. However, several members of Congress have urged lawmakers to pass legislation creating new regulations surrounding AI.