Amodei unveils 'pace the frontier' plan, commits Anthropic to embedded METR evaluators

Amodei's post arrives amid an intensifying debate over AI safety and alignment. This week, researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, writing that leading AI companies are 'gambling with our lives,' though Amodei's post did not explicitly mention the resignation. Amodei instead pointed to the OpenAI-HuggingFace hack and what he described as AI advancing drastically faster, particularly its growing ability to build the next generation of AI.

His three proposals move from unilateral action to international coordination. The first involves embedded evaluators from third-party organizations like METR, which Amodei compared to regulators embedded with bank employees. The second calls for leading AI companies in democratic countries to coordinate common safety standards and limits on unchecked progress, with Amodei acknowledging antitrust concerns and suggesting the US government issue a narrow waiver for safety conversations. The third envisions global coordination, including with China, though he admitted stark limits on what can be achieved.

Critics remain skeptical. Journalist Brian Merchant wrote that he has yet to see credible step-by-step documentation of how AI might move from self-recursively improving AI to killing every human, and suggested proposals like Amodei's would likely only serve Anthropic and OpenAI — 'what regulatory capture looks like in action.' Amodei responded that the backlash is fundamentally a crisis of trust and that he continues to believe AI can enormously improve human life. The outcome likely hinges on whether governments grant the antitrust waiver Amodei seeks and whether other frontier companies match Anthropic's evaluator commitment.