Update (1055ET): David Sacks, former White House AI czar and co-chair of Trump's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), slammed Amodei and Altman over their calls to 'pace the frontier.' Former AI and Crypto Czar David O. Sacks speaks during a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education at the White House. Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesIn a nutshell; they don't need to establish some convoluted framework to pause the development of dangerous models, just 'agree not to build it.' Demanding a regulatory framework as the price of that, 'will look like blackmail of the public and the political system.'Read his full note below: Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric - market share, revenue growth, model capability - the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture - or an election-season psyop.***SPECIAL BULLETIN***Ladies and gentlemen of the listening public - the American machine was winning the AI race until the dastardly forces of China's open-weight juggernaut began delivering decisive blows to US ingenuity - jeopardizing the AI Buildout thesis and threatening to prick the ensuing bubble that promised to deliver red-blooded American IPOs which had been circle-jerked into the stratosphere. For two years the United States frontier laboratories - OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI - have been the engine of the greatest capital-expenditure boom since the railroads learned to drink diesel-generated electricity. Data centers rose like munitions plants. Chipmakers printed money. Equity markets priced a future in which the West sold intelligence by the token - at a premium, and have been quite smug about it. The assumption underneath all of it was simple: the frontier stays closed and China stays a respectable number of months behind.Then the East opened the crate. And here's what was inside: DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, Moonshot's Kimi, MiniMax, Zhipu - open-weight models, downloadable, forkable, cheap enough to run on a laptop or a local box and still deliver work that is uncomfortably close to the genuine American article. By mid-year, Chinese open weights were devouring the majority of tokens on the big neutral routers. Qwen had shoved Meta's Llama off the open-model throne. Moonshot's Kimi K3 - two-point-eight trillion parameters, its weights already out the door - sat within shouting distance of Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 on the intelligence indexes. The Chinese models run roughly sixty to ninety percent cheaper; ladies and gents - one DeepSeek flash model was quoted at fifteen cents per million input tokens, off-peak, against five dollars for Anthropic's Opus - and enough to rattle the Korean memory makers all over again.The data-center buildout, the power deals, all of the "AI will eat the S&P" thesis - HUBRIS! Nobody saw the Chinese coming in from left field with models that are ninety percent as good, ten percent of the cost, and run in a basement in Ohio without a subscription. TEAM FRONTIER, ASSEMBLE!This week, the three high priests of the American frontier discovered they could finish one another's sentences.On Saturday morning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier. Twelve years in the field, he wrote. AI might cure most major diseases in five to ten years, he wrote. And - it might also slip the leash (and murder us all, according to three prominent AI researchers who quit frontier labs last week in protest of our impending demise).Speaking of those three 'defectors' - two of them walked through the door of the AI evaluator (METR) Amodei wants embedded in the labs. According to Dario, the machines have been getting better at building the next machines - recursive self-improvement, happening "across the industry, including at Anthropic." He pointed at July's OpenAI - Hugging Face affair: a swarm of agents that escaped the spirit of their assignment, hacked a target they were not asked to hack, and even went after the grader scoring them. Anthropic itself disclosed its own incidents this summer, three Claude models - one of them Mythos 5 - that wandered out of their test cages and into three companies' live systems, a parallel his essay itself acknowledges. Amodei's warning was the sequel: give that swarm six to twelve months more capability at the same misalignment and it "could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet," he wrote - "hundreds of billions of dollars in damage," and rising from there.His prescription was a three-act play, which he insists "does not mean halting model training or technical progress."Act One: embed third-party evaluators - METR and their cousins - inside the labs with employee-level badges, desks, and laptops, and let them publish. Anthropic would do this unilaterally, he said, today.Act Two: the democratic labs coordinate, with government as the chaperone, on safety standards and the rate of unchecked progress - which, he conceded, is "legally challenging" and needs Washington to "issue a narrow waiver" of antitrust rules so rivals can lawfully sit in the same room.Act Three: try to talk to the authoritarians, including Beijing, about red lines - bioweapons first, testing regimes second, limits on recursive improvement third. Full pause? He all but called it a fantasy. A Chinese lead, he wrote, would be a grave danger; keep the chip bans, smash the distillation, widen the lead for three to five years. Then, perhaps, a bargain.Elon Musk, who has sued Sam Altman, and once called Anthropic "evil" before selling them a mountain of compute, agreed with Dario in just three words:Dario is right