Dario Amodei

We Must Pace the Frontier

Eleven days after his own alignment team published a deliberate reproduction of the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, Anthropic's CEO argues that the rate of capability advancement itself must now be slowed. Two things changed his mind. AI has been “advancing drastically faster” since roughly this summer, driven by recursive self-improvement, which he says “is starting to happen across the industry, including at Anthropic.” And the OpenAI incident, which he refuses to file as one company's failure: “similar, though less severe, incidents have happened across the industry, including at Anthropic,” caused in part by something unglamorous — “imperfect filtering of broken reinforcement learning environments,” an execution failure rather than a missing theory. His reading of what nearly happened is a forecast, not a finding: a swarm with similar misalignment but greater capability could, within 6–12 months, hold the internet with a persistent botnet and cost hundreds of billions. The proposal is three steps of rising difficulty. Anthropic unilaterally commits to the first: embedded third-party evaluators — desks, badges, company laptops, permissions comparable to internal risk teams, and the right to publish findings Anthropic may redact only for security, legal, commercial, or third-party reasons, never for being unfavourable, with reviewers free to say publicly when a redaction mattered. The second, coordination among democratic labs on capability checkpoints, needs legislation or an antitrust waiver. The third, agreement with China, he grades across four levels — from a bioweapons ban (“probably possible”) to a full pause (“unlikely to actually happen any time soon”). Two things sit together uneasily. Pacing is explicitly not halting: “progress will still seem fast.” And it is conditioned on democracies holding their lead — the chip-export and distillation asks he made in July, plus security against weight theft, are here the precondition for slowing down at all.

Anthropic Designated a Supply Chain Risk

The Trump administration designates Anthropic a 'supply chain risk to national security' — a label previously reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei — after the company refuses to remove two guardrails from its $200M Pentagon contract: no mass surveillance of Americans, and no fully autonomous weapons. Defense Secretary Hegseth issues the designation hours after a Friday 5:01 PM deadline passes without agreement. Trump orders all federal agencies to cease using Anthropic technology. In an exclusive CBS interview that evening, CEO Dario Amodei calls the action 'retaliatory and punitive,' vows to challenge it in court, and declares: 'We're gonna be fine.' Sam Altman and workers across OpenAI and Google voice support for Anthropic's position. The crisis marks the most consequential clash between an AI company and the U.S. government over the boundaries of military AI use.

"We have these two red lines. We've had them from day one. We are still advocating for those red lines. We're not going to move on those red lines."

The Adolescence of Technology

Anthropic CEO warns humanity is entering the most dangerous window in AI history. The 20,000-word essay argues AI as capable as all humans will arrive within two years, predicts 50% of entry-level white collar jobs eliminated in 1-5 years, and reveals concerning 'alignment faking' behaviors in Claude 4 Opus testing.

Machines of Loving Grace

Anthropic CEO outlines an optimistic vision where AI could compress 50-100 years of progress into 5-10 years across biology, health, economic development, and governance—if developed responsibly.