OpenAI boss and Elon Musk back calls to put brakes on ‘reckless' AI development

Growing numbers of US lawmakers ​are calling for new rules after cases of AI agents going rogue and researchers quitting over safety concerns.

OpenAI boss and Elon Musk back calls to put brakes on ‘reckless’ AI development

Rare show of unity from rival developers after safety warnings from Anthropic boss and AI researchers

Sam Altman and Elon Musk have backed a call from the head of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, to “slow the pace” of AI development after he warned that an AI swarm could otherwise become capable of “taking over the entire internet” within a year.

In a rare show of unity, the rival technology leaders threw their weight behind the appeal from the founder and chief executive of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic , which came after a series of warnings from AI researchers last week.

In an essay , Amodei laid out his thoughts on “why the AI industry should slow down”, with a three-part plan for doing so, starting with giving independent monitors constant access to developers’ research processes.

Amodei said “building [AI] too fast is reckless” and he feared that after hundreds of OpenAI agents hacked into the Hugging Face website this summer, a swarm with greater capabilities but similarly misaligned could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage by “taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet”.

This was disputed by some AI experts as not particularly plausible and to be treated with scepticism.

Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, responded to Amodei’s slowdown plan with a post on X: “Dario is right.” He said: “I’ve been sounding the alarm on AI for a long time,” and referred to a 2014 post where he said: “We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.”

Amodei’s call comes as Anthropic prepares to float on the US stock market, in what is expected to be the biggest initial public offering of all time. It is expected to start marketing its planned $2tn-plus (£1.5tn) IPO soon.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, responded to Amodei’s comments on Saturday. “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” he said in a post on X. “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”

He also said OpenAI would not go public in 2026 , citing safety concerns over artificial intelligence . “I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman told Fortune .

Asked why he, Amodei, Musk, and the chief executives of Meta and Google did not sit down and “get on the same page” about a collective slowdown, he said: “I think that will happen.”

Demis Hassabis, co-founder and chair of Google Deep Mind, also said: “The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.”

Amodei’s plan seeks a waiver from the US government to allow the frontier AI companies to coordinate without being punished for anti-competitive collusion. But David Sacks, a co-chair of Donald Trump’s council of advisers on science and technology, said: “Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission … Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyber-attack.”