What execs and politicians are saying about slowing down AI development

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's weekend essay 'We Must Pace the Frontier' triggered a wave of responses from AI industry leaders and politicians. Amodei's three-step proposal includes embedded third-party evaluators to verify safety adherence, coordination among frontier AI companies in democratic countries, and global coordination between democratic and authoritarian governments on development pace. In a notably rare alignment among competing labs, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly agreed — 'I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier' — and committed to independent evaluators at OpenAI. Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis also endorsed the direction, saying the essay points 'towards the right path forward.' President Trump also weighed in on the debate. Both Amodei and Altman drew a clear distinction between 'pacing' and 'stopping' — both said progress should continue, just more deliberately. Altman flagged two failure modes to avoid: AI systems gaining control of the future, and excessive power concentration among humans. Anthropic has unilaterally committed to the first step — independent third-party evaluators — while calling on others to follow. The convergence across OpenAI and Google DeepMind on safety pacing rhetoric, if not yet on specific mechanisms, marks a notable shift in how frontier labs are publicly framing the safety debate.