Elon Musk backs Dario Amodei's arguments about pacing the frontier, saying “Dario is right”
Top executives at three of the nation's leading AI labs are calling for a slowdown in the development of advanced artificial intelligence. — The comments are a rare display …
Politico
Context & Ripple Effects
Amodei’s proposal is framed as pacing rather than stopping development: companies would use the interval to align and safeguard models while third-party evaluators verify them. Musk’s endorsement gives that framing backing from a prominent AI competitor and critic.
The intervention follows July memos in which Hassabis, Altman and Amodei shared support for an AI regulatory framework but diverged over the US government’s role. Amodei has also identified coordination with China as the central dilemma for any voluntary pacing regime.
First-order effects
Musk’s public support expands the visible coalition behind Amodei’s pacing proposal, giving Anthropic’s preferred safety framing greater standing in the frontier-AI debate.
Amodei’s proposed use of embedded and third-party evaluators becomes a more concrete focal point for labs arguing that continued training should be paired with verification and safeguards.
Second-order effects
The agreement among leading lab executives on a regulatory framework, alongside disagreement over the US government’s role, shifts the competitive argument toward who sets and enforces evaluation standards.
Amodei’s concern that China may not accept comparable limits makes international coordination—not only voluntary commitments by US labs—a central constraint on any shared pacing approach.
Third-order effects
If frontier labs translate public support for pacing into common evaluation practices, safety review could become an operational condition of advancing models rather than a separate policy debate.
The episode points toward frontier AI governance being negotiated through a mix of lab commitments, external evaluators and state coordination, with cross-border alignment determining its durability.
The trend: Frontier AI labs are moving from broad safety warnings toward institutionalized governance proposals centered on evaluation, state involvement and international coordination.
This is a big update for me personally. Not that he agrees, but that he supports pacing. He never signed the letter. This does change my model of things a little.
Elon, perhaps the last person I would've thought would agreed that the development of frontier models should slow, has said he agrees with Dario's “We Must Pace The Frontier” blog post Nominally, that means OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI have now signalled their willingness to slow. W…
I think one reason some are skeptical of this wave of Do Something-ism is less about the foundational claims (I think we can all agree recursive models are dangerous regardless of whether they are “AGI
Strong disagree. If the US labs slow down, either voluntarily or due to regulation, it won't be long before other countries with relentless ambition take the lead in AI. …
I think there's actually quite an easy and obvious way to solve the collective action problem of how to make the AI companies stop conducting risky research, and it's to make it very clear that they're legally liable for anything their models do. www.politico.com/news/2026/09...
Elon Musk, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have all endorsed a call to slow down the pace of AI model development. — Given the frontier labs have been engaged in a game of prisoner's dilemma burning billions to train models, a mutual slowdown before everyone runs out of cash is qui…
Wild 24 hours for AI and lots of different proposals have been made. TLDR; the only *tangible* new fact is that OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have embedded 3rd party evaluators from unknown organizations with Dario floating METR as a possibility. Having 3rd party evaluators i…