Oluwadi
Investigating the Overlooked
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Oluwadi
Investigating the Overlooked
"We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote on September 12, 2026, in a roughly 3,800-word essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," published on his personal site. "Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain."[1] It is an unusual thing for the head of a company that has spent the last two years racing to ship ever more capable models to say in public. Stranger still is what happened next: within roughly a day, the industry's other most powerful executives were saying it too.
Amodei's proposal was explicit and three-part. First, Anthropic would unilaterally give outside evaluators -- naming the AI safety group METR specifically -- "desks in our offices, access badges, and company laptops," with standing rights to publish what they find without Anthropic's editorial control.[1] Second, frontier labs within democracies would agree to common, industry-wide pacing standards applied equally to every company actually at the frontier. Third, democratic governments would eventually try to extend that pacing coordination to authoritarian governments as well.[1]
OpenAI's Sam Altman told staff the company was open to slowing its own frontier work too, and followed with a public post the next day: "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. 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."[2] Elon Musk, who runs a third frontier lab in xAI, added two words of his own on X: "Dario is right."[2] Three competitors who have spent two years locked in a capital and capability arms race publicly agreeing on anything, let alone agreeing to voluntarily slow down, is not normal industry behavior -- which is exactly what made the pushback that followed notable too.
Late that same Saturday night, David Sacks posted a public rebuttal on X daring Amodei and Altman to slow down on their own, without asking government for anything in return. "Stop pretending you need anyone else's permission," Sacks wrote, adding that the labs should "stop pretending you need to suspend antitrust law in order to create a cartel," and that they should "stop pretending METR is independent of Anthropic when they are literally intertwined with Anthropic's investors and staff" and "stop pretending you need these same people to police your competitors who are not even at the frontier of AI."[3] His underlying argument: model safety is ordinary commercial risk management -- a company that ships a dangerous product already faces real product-liability exposure -- and a leading lab that genuinely believes its next model is too risky to release does not need a government-blessed standards body to justify holding it back.[3]
Sacks' title is worth getting exactly right, because the loose version of it is already circulating. He was Trump's White House AI and crypto czar from the start of the administration, but he stepped down from that specific role in March 2026 after exhausting the 130-day limit on his status as a special government employee, moving to co-chair the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology alongside White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios.[4] He is not currently the government's AI czar in name. He remains, by every available account, one of the administration's loudest and most closely watched voices on AI policy -- which is a different, narrower claim, and the one this piece is making.
The administration's actual position arrived a day later and more bluntly, from the president himself. Asked about the pacing calls from Amodei, Altman, and Musk while at his golf course in Ireland on Sunday, September 14, Trump rejected the idea outright: "We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins." He added: "We can put guardrails. We can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up."[5]
The pacing call did not pause Anthropic's own buildout. Since October 2025, the company has signed contracts for 14.8 gigawatts of compute capacity -- roughly ten to fifteen times what it was running as of mid-2025 -- adding up to as much as $517 billion in compute commitments over the coming decade, according to reporting from The Information. Google and Amazon combined account for more than $300 billion of that across roughly 11 GW; Microsoft has separately pledged $30 billion in Azure capacity; SpaceX and other providers make up the rest. Most of it is structured as take-or-pay: Anthropic owes the minimum spend whether or not it uses the capacity.[6] That is not a contradiction of Amodei's essay -- pacing capability growth and building out infrastructure are different levers -- but it is the plain fact sitting underneath a company simultaneously arguing the industry should deliberately slow down.
Altman, separately, gave Fortune a related answer the same week about why OpenAI is staying private a while longer. Asked directly whether an IPO was off the table for 2026, he said: "I would say not 2026, yeah. We got a lot of stuff to do." Pressed on the reasoning, he was more specific: "I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public."[7] Both OpenAI and Anthropic have nonetheless filed confidential IPO paperwork and are reportedly targeting valuations approaching $1 trillion -- so "not yet" and "not never" are two different claims, and only one of them is the one being made out loud this week.
Four days into this, Fitch Ratings put a number on what happens if the spending behind all of it turns out to be wrong. In a report dated September 10, 2026, Fitch modeled a scenario combining an AI-investment retreat with a broader selloff: US stocks falling 35% over six months, a 15% decline in overseas equities, US GDP contracting 0.6% in 2027 with year-over-year growth turning negative in the second quarter, private capital spending dropping more than 6%, and global growth falling below 1% -- a level Fitch itself characterized as outright stagnation.[8]
Fitch was explicit, in its own language, that this is "a severe downside scenario, not its forecast" -- a model built to stress-test what a bust would look like, not a prediction that one is coming.[8] That distinction did not survive first contact with wider circulation. A newsletter forwarded to this site's author this week cited the same Fitch report as proof that "the bubble can no longer be stopped" -- treating a modeled downside as a foregone conclusion. That is not what the report says, and the difference is not a technicality. A ratings agency stress-testing a bad outcome is doing exactly what ratings agencies are supposed to do; a newsletter converting that stress test into a certainty is doing something else, and it is the kind of gap between what a source actually said and what got repeated that is worth naming plainly rather than letting stand.
Why does this matter? Three people who run or heavily influence the three companies building the most capable AI systems on earth spent a week in open, public disagreement over whether their own industry should regulate itself or be regulated -- and the fight is not academic, because the same week produced a $517 billion compute bet from one of those companies and a modeled 35% stock-market downside tied to the same industry from an independent ratings agency. Amodei's proposal, Altman's alignment, and Sacks' rebuttal are all arguments about who gets to decide when AI development has gone too fast: the labs policing themselves, a coalition of labs setting shared standards, or a government that just said, through its president, it has no interest in slowing down at all. None of that argument requires the Fitch scenario to be a prediction to matter -- it only requires the underlying bet, the $517 billion and the 14.8 gigawatts, to be real, which it is. What doesn't hold up is skipping the word "scenario" on the way to a headline.