AI leaders call for slowing down. The government doesn’t want to

Amid a firestorm of discussion about the state of AI, some leading CEOs have split with the federal government on whether to slow AI development.

“If slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post on Sept. 12.

Both Elon Musk, who runs xAI, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, agreed with Amodei in X posts over the weekend.

President Donald Trump brushed aside the CEOs warnings, telling reporters at a Sept. 13 golf tournament, “We can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up and they're bringing up things that won't happen.”

He doubled down in a Sept. 14 Truth Social post.

In his essay, Amodei recommended a three-step plan for leading AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Deep Mind to “pace the frontier.” This would create more time to manage AI risks and build it out safely, he said. Amodei also called on the…

Original source: https://www.usatoday.com/money/