We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training. You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…

.@L3HarrisTech says Palantir helped them beat frontier AI models in less than 2 days, at 95% lower cost: "When we fine-tuned open source models trained on our own data, we were able to outperform the frontier models in less than 48 hours." "The cost of our fine-tuned open source model was 95% lower than the frontier models we were using." "AI is a commodity. It's all about the data. We view our data as a corporate asset. It's our unique hard-earned knowledge." "We believe American defense companies should not be a vassal for frontier AI labs, handing over our data and institutional knowledge, hoping to rent back the intelligence it creates." " We own the model, we own the compute, we own the advantage."

Can we all agree that “frontier labs are lying about AI safety to pump their IPOs, capture the regulators, and make more money” is a conspiracy theory at this point? For it to be true, Sam, Dario, Demis, and Elon all have to be lying, along with a big chunk of their execs, chief scientists, and resigning employees. It also asks you to believe the labs volunteered for much heavier scrutiny that slows them down in the middle of the biggest ARR growth run in the history of capitalism with no signs of slowing down … because they want to make more money by inventing regulatory hurdles that only they can clear(?). And OpenAI has now said it would even be willing to delay its own IPO over safety concerns - i.e. put off (maybe risk entirely) the biggest liquidity event ever in Silicon Valley. The conspiracy requires us to believe that they’re doing that to make more money(?) Elon agrees with Dario; i.e. the guy who ran D.O.G.E is *asking for more scrutiny and regulation*. And we're supposed to believe that's because he thinks it will help his company succeed(?) A much simpler explanation at this point: they think the risk is real.

Translation: our gross margins are getting competed down to 0 by open source models and our capex burn rate is too high. Let’s maintain our margins with regulatory capture, ban open source models, and slow down the capex arms race. All with a virtue signaling cherry on top.

so Dario, Elon, etc agree we should slow down here but China isn't going to slowdown and I thought this was a race to who gets to AGI first?

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.