Altman, Musk, and Hassabis back Amodei’s call to pace the frontier

After Dario Amodei’s “We Must Pace the Frontier” essay, Sam Altman said OpenAI would match independent evaluators with employee-like access, Elon Musk wrote “Dario is right,” and Demis Hassabis said the direction is correct while details need work.

In one news cycle, the CEOs of OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind publicly backed Anthropic’s CEO on slowing the frontier and letting outside reviewers in. That cross-lab signal is the filing, not a finished safety deal.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published “We Must Pace the Frontier.” Pacing here means slowing how fast the most capable models improve, so safety work can keep up. He proposed embedded third-party evaluators — outside reviewers sitting inside the lab, an Anthropic unilateral commit — plus democratic coordination on safety standards, and harder global coordination. That essay is, including his swarm and damage estimates. This filing is the same-day CEO replies, not a reprint of that analysis.

The same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X endorsing pacing. The Guardian quotes him: “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.” He wrote that committing to independent evaluators with employee-like access “is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.” Those are Altman’s public words as reported.

The same day, xAI’s Elon Musk publicly replied “Dario is right.” The Guardian attributes that line to his X post.

The same day and evening, Demis Hassabis — Google DeepMind co-founder and Alphabet’s chief scientist — posted on X that Amodei’s essay “points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.” He tied that to Google DeepMind’s proposed industry-wide standards body for frontier AI. Wording as reported from that X post.