Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Urges Industry to Slow AI Development Amid Growing Safety Risks

The race to develop artificial intelligence is in dire need of a slowdown, Anthropic’s chief executive said in an essay posted early Saturday. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” CEO Dario Amodei wrote in the 3,800-word post to his website.

Amodei, who heads one of the world’s leading AI companies and its chatbot Claude, has been a strong proponent for the technology’s advancement — and similarly been accused of “doomerism” in his warnings about AI’s risks. He acknowledged Saturday that people may lose control of AI, and the technology can be misused for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.

In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Saturday, Amodei called on industry leaders to work together to avoid the wrong paths and the possibility of AI harming humanity. “If we go too slow, I still believe that the wrong people will be in charge of the technology. And that, again, will bring the probability of things going wrong very high,” he said. The full interview is set to air Monday evening on CNN.

Amodei’s call to action comes on the heels of an Anthropic researcher’s resignation over concerns that the firm and its competitors are not acting responsibly with AI development. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” the researcher, Jacob Coxon, posted Tuesday on X.

Amodei called on AI companies to impose guardrails for pacing the frontier, suggesting that firms commit to hiring embedded third-party evaluators to verify safety practices. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, whose xAI company powers the chatbot Grok, both expressed support for Amodei's proposals on X.