Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Sept. 12 arguing that AI companies must deliberately slow the pace at which they improve model capabilities, rather than race ahead and try to fix safety problems after the fact. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," he wrote.
Amodei's first step is what he called embedded evaluators: independent auditors from organizations like METR given office space, access badges and permissions comparable to internal staff, so they can verify a company's safety and deployment practices from the inside rather than relying on self-reporting. He compared the arrangement to bank regulators who work embedded alongside employees. Anthropic said it is making this change unilaterally, with contractual rights for evaluators to publish findings without editorial control, though security-sensitive details may be redacted.
The second step calls for AI companies within democratic countries to agree on common safety standards and limits on development pace, with government support to address antitrust concerns that coordination between competitors would otherwise raise. The third and least defined step is an attempt at coordination between democratic and authoritarian governments on narrowly scoped risks, such as biological weapons, which Amodei acknowledged is hard to verify.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman endorsed the plan within hours of its publication. "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier," he said, according to TechCrunch. The essay followed a researcher's resignation from Anthropic over safety concerns and a security incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face earlier in the month.
Two rival CEOs publicly agreeing to slow down is not something this industry does often, and the embedded-evaluator model is the concrete part: it puts an outside party inside a lab with the access needed to catch a gap between what a company claims and what it does. Builders working with frontier labs should expect evaluator access and pacing commitments to become a bar competitors get measured against, not just a one-off announcement.