Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has announced the company is committing to a new safety measure—giving independent evaluators permanent, employee-level access inside the company—as part of a broader three-step plan he says is needed to slow the pace of AI development.
In an essay published on Saturday, Amodei laid out a plan aimed at “pacing the frontier,” or slowing AI development. First, it calls for every frontier AI company to give independent evaluators permanent, employee-level access to verify safety practices and report incidents; second, companies in democratic countries to agree on common safety standards that limit the rate of unchecked progress; and third, democratic governments to attempt coordination with authoritarian states, starting with agreements that are in everyone’s interest, such as a ban on using AI to develop biological weapons.
Amodei has long cautioned about the pace of AI development, but he says two recent shifts have increased the need for urgent safeguards on the technology. Models, he said, are increasingly able to build their successors, which is accelerating progress further. The industry has also seen a string of safety incidents, he added, including within Anthropic itself. He believes even a couple of years of pacing model development would give researchers time to reduce the risk of something going wrong, and calls on the industry to do so now.
