We Must Pace the Frontier
Essay by **Dario Amodei**, CEO of **Anthropic**, published on darioamodei.com in **September 2026** (~2,900 words, four sections), on his personal site rather than the company's. In it he announces a revised position: *"we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models."* Two facts led him there. **(1)** Since summer 2026, **recursive self-improvement** — AI building the next generation of AI — has been taking hold across the industry, Anthropic included. **(2)** The **incident Hugging Face**, which he abbreviates "OAI-HF" and refuses to treat as the failure of a single actor: *"it's incumbent on every frontier AI company to act as if OAI-HF had happened to them."* His forecast: within **6-12 months**, a swarm comparable but more capable could hold the internet hostage with a persistent botnet, for **hundreds of billions of dollars** in damage. Hence a three-step plan of increasing difficulty. **(a)** **Embedded third-party evaluators** (of the **METR** type) with employee-level access — offices, badges, laptops, the right to publish without editorial control from Anthropic; a commitment made unilaterally, with no equivalent elsewhere in the industry. **(b)** **Coordination among democracies**: targeted regulation, common standards under an antitrust exemption, and *checkpoints* tying a given capability X to alignment certifications Y and Z. **(c)** **Global coordination** with China, graduated across four levels from the most feasible (banning bioterrorism-enabling uses) to the least likely (a general pause), with the cap on the speed of self-improvement compared to the **SALT** treaties. A condition attached to the whole: preserving the American lead (chips, distillation, weight theft). Counterpoint in the corpus: [[zuckerberg-meta-future-is-for-everyone-superintelligence-2026-08-10]].
Dario Amodei (CEO et cofondateur d'Anthropic) · sur son site personnel darioamodei.com.