Anthropic and OpenAI, along with Google, have called for a coordinated slowdown of frontier AI development, citing safety concerns. The proposal aims to secure antitrust exemptions to implement the changes, according to industry leaders.
Industry figures like Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere, argue the initiative is an attempt to lock out competitors and weaken open-weight AI. Gomez criticized the proposal as a 'cartel by another name,' highlighting the barriers to entry it would create.
David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar under President Trump, responded to the call for a slowdown, noting that OpenAI and Anthropic hold a duopoly in frontier intelligence. He suggested the move is partly motivated by business considerations rather than altruism.
"A wolf in sheep's clothing, a cartel by any other name," wrote Aidan Gomez in a blog post, arguing that the safety warnings are a smokescreen. He pointed out that the few evaluation organizations labeled 'independent' are funded by the same companies they are supposed to audit.
Niels Rogge, a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, called the statements from Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei and others 'the most bizarre nonsense I've read lately.' Rogge argued that the focus on Chinese models like those from DeepSeek and Z.ai is more about protecting competitive edge than safety.
President Donald Trump dismissed AI takeover warnings as a 'hoax,' comparing them to climate change and the Russia investigation. He claimed that Chinese President Xi has stated China will not hinder AI development, suggesting the slowdown proposal is a U.S. effort to cement its lead in AI.
Source: thedecoder
