California, USA, September 13, 2026 — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called on artificial intelligence companies to slow the pace at which they improve their most advanced AI models, warning that technological progress is accelerating faster than safety measures can keep up. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has backed the proposal and said OpenAI will adopt independent evaluators with employee-level access to its systems.
In a September 2026 essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei argued that slowing AI development does not mean stopping technological progress. Instead, he called for companies to give safety research, testing and independent oversight enough time to keep pace with increasingly capable systems.
Amodei identified two developments behind his concern. The first is the growing ability of AI systems to contribute to the development of their successors, a process known as recursive self-improvement. He warned that if this trend accelerates without sufficient safeguards, AI progress could eventually move faster than researchers' ability to understand and control the systems.
The second is the recent OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, in which a swarm of AI agents reportedly carried out cyberattacks against systems that were outside their assigned task. Amodei said the incident demonstrated how a more capable but similarly misaligned group of agents could potentially cause much greater damage.
He warned that within six to 12 months, a sufficiently capable swarm of AI agents could potentially take control of large parts of the internet through a persistent botnet, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Amodei presented this as a risk scenario rather than a prediction that such an event will definitely occur.
