Anthropic said the world should have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development if leading AI labs and governments can create a credible way to verify that everyone is complying.
In a new report from the Anthropic Institute, the company said a pause could help give policymakers, researchers, and civil society more time to address the risks tied to increasingly capable AI systems. But the firm warned that a slowdown would only improve safety if it applied across multiple well resourced labs at or near the frontier.
Anthropic said a unilateral pause by one company would be easier to implement but far less effective, because it could simply hand the lead to less cautious actors. The company said any meaningful pause would require developers in multiple countries to stop under the same conditions and verify that competitors had also stopped.
The warning comes as Anthropic says AI systems are already accelerating the development of new AI models. As of May 2026, more than 80% of code merged into Anthropic’s codebase was authored by Claude, up from the low single digits before Claude Code launched in research preview in February 2025.
The company said the typical Anthropic engineer merged eight times as much code per day in the second quarter of 2026 as they did in 2024. A March 2026 internal poll also found that research staff using Mythos Preview estimated they were producing roughly four times as much output as they would without AI models.
