OpenAI and Anthropic staff blindsided by Amodei and Altman's call to slow AI frontier, warn evaluators could jeopardize security
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| Source: Techmeme | Original article
OpenAI and Anthropic employees say they were surprised by Dario Amodei’s and Sam Altman’s push to slow AI development, warning that evaluator involvement could jeopardize security.
OpenAI and Anthropic employees say they were taken by surprise when Anthropic chief Dario Amodei published a September 12 essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier” and OpenAI’s Sam Altman quickly backed the proposal. Both CEOs called for an industry‑wide slowdown of frontier‑model development and for the insertion of third‑party evaluators who would be granted employee‑level access to the labs’ most advanced systems. According to staff and safety researchers quoted by the Financial Times, the announcement came without prior internal discussion, leaving many engineers and researchers feeling “blindsided.”
The move matters because it signals a shift from private safety roadmaps to a more public, coordinated governance model, but it also raises fresh security concerns. Critics within the companies warn that giving external evaluators deep access could create new attack vectors or inadvertent leaks of proprietary technology. The proposal follows a series of high‑profile safety warnings this month, including our earlier coverage of Anthropic’s internal debates over consciousness‑imitating models and Microsoft’s alarm that the rival could have a “disastrous impact” on humanity.
What to watch next: both firms have said they will flesh out the evaluator framework in the coming weeks, but details remain scarce. Industry observers will be looking for concrete guidelines on vetting evaluators, oversight mechanisms, and how the slowdown will be enforced across competing labs. The reaction of other major players—Google DeepMind, xAI and Hugging Face—will also shape whether the call becomes a de‑facto industry standard or a contested experiment in AI governance.
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