Even Other AI Labs Are Rallying Around Anthropic’s Slowdown Proposal

This weekend, the AI discourse took a major step forward not only when Anthropic CEO Dario Amade released a new essay called We Must Pace the Frontier, but when the leaders of most of the other labs came out publicly to support it. More than we've had before, the letter contains a set of specific proposals that, if nothing else, give us something much more tangible to debate than the vagaries of general AI risk. It's early, but it feels to me like a major inflection point. Like the labs recognizing that the days of them being the sole arbiters of how fast AI moves are coming to a close. And within that, the negotiations on what the next phase means beginning. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright, friends. Quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Blitzy, Harbor, and HyperAgent. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aideallybrief or you can subscribe at Apple Podcasts. And to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsorsaidailybrief dot ai. Now, one more quick note: If you have been anywhere near basically any media source, you will know that the conversation is entirely around this new essay from Anthropic CEO Dario Amade. So unsurprisingly, this will be a main only episode. I know the coverage right now is heavily slanted towards some of these big political, societal, safety type of questions. But in between, I'm trying to give you as much practical stuff as I can to keep the balance. This is simply where the industry discourse is right now and what I think is important for everyone to understand and have a stake in the conversation around. Sometimes in AI, there are a million things going on, and trying to keep track of it all without sinking is like skipping rocks across a pond. In other cases, there is just one thing, one conversation that is absolutely dominating, and that's what we had this weekend. The AI safety discourse, which ratcheted up last weekend, crescendoed on Saturday with a new 3,000 word blog post from Anthropic CEO Dario Amade called We Must Pace the Frontier. It is the clearest and most specific call yet for a shift in how the Frontier AI labs operate, an attempt to slow the pace of development of AI to something more manageable. As you might imagine, the piece absolutely dominated discourse in the AI and extended political circles over the weekend, and part of that was due to how it was received by other AI leaders. The Post begins with a recitation of Dario's argument for why AI is worth the risk. Dario says that he believes that AI could dramatically raise the quality of human life, that it could accelerate economic growth, cure most major diseases, and, as he puts it, usher in a renaissance …