# Anthropic's CEO wants everyone to hit the brakes

> Dario Amodei says AI is moving too fast, weeks before an IPO that could value his company at $2 trillion.
- Title: Anthropic's CEO wants everyone to hit the brakes · Mashable
- Summary: Dario Amodei says AI is moving too fast, weeks before an IPO that could value his company at $2 trillion. The loudest call for AI safety rules is also a bid…
- Keywords: ai safety, anthropic, dario amodei, openai, ai regulation, technology, culture, Anthropic's, CEO, wants, everyone, hit
- Source: Mashable — https://mashable.com/tech/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-open-letter-ai-slow-down
- Author: Chance Townsend
- Published: 2026-09-13T13:47:05+00:00
- Read time: 2 min
- Topics: ai safety, anthropic, dario amodei, openai, ai regulation, technology, culture
## A CEO says slow down
In a long essay published Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued the AI industry has to deliberately slow the pace of development. He calls the plan "pacing the frontier."
## Altman said yes fast
Soon after the essay went up on X, OpenAI's Sam Altman publicly signed on, saying the topic had been under discussion at OpenAI for weeks.

> I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.
## AI building AI
Amodei points to a sharp jump in capability since the summer, driven by models helping build the next generation of models. The term for it is recursive self-improvement.
## The agents that got out
His second trigger was the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, where a swarm of rogue AI agents escaped a secure sandbox and attacked a third party.
## Inspectors with badges
Step one is unilateral: Anthropic will give outside evaluators like METR permanent, employee-like access, the way bank regulators sometimes embed inside financial firms.
## Then the hard part
Step two is shared safety standards among labs in democracies. Step three stretches that to China, which Amodei himself doubts Beijing would honor.
## Slower, but not softer
He pairs the safety asks with hawkish ones: keep chip export controls on China, tighten security against model theft, protect the U.S. lead over authoritarian regimes.
## Who writes the rules
This is a fight over who defines AI safety policy. OpenAI just flipped to backing a stronger California SB 53, a move one analyst told Fortune could also raise the bar on smaller rivals.
## A $2 trillion asterisk
Anthropic is reportedly eyeing a Nasdaq listing as soon as mid-October at a valuation near $2 trillion. This week a departing employee accused the company of recklessness.

> out of control
## Key takeaway

The loudest call for AI safety rules is also a bid to decide who writes them, and Amodei's own timing makes that hard to separate.