ANTHROPIC chief Dario Amodei wants the companies building the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence to slow down. Not stop, but slow the advance of frontier capabilities enough for safety and security work to catch up. He calls it “pacing the frontier”. Amodei says two things have changed. AI is beginning to help build the next generation of AI, raising the possibility of recursive self-improvement. At the same time, frontier agents have started doing things during testing that their developers did not expect or authorise.

Then came Jacob Coxon. The Anthropic resear­cher, who had previously worked at OpenAI, resigned before his equity vested and accused the industry of “gambling with our lives”. His fear that increasingly autonomous systems could threaten humanity before the end of the decade is not a scientific forecast. What makes Coxon important is where the warning comes from, ie, someone who worked inside two laboratories closest to the frontier.

There is, however, an uncomfortable irony in Big Tech sounding the alarm.

Anthropic is not standing outside this economy warning everyone else about it. In 2025, it accepted a two-year Pentagon agreement with a $200 million ceiling to develop AI capabilities for US national security. It built Claude Gov for classified environments and says its systems support intelligence analysis, operational planning, and cyber operations. Anthropic says it later refused demands that would have removed its restrictions around mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. The contradiction is that companies warning that powerful AI may become difficult to control are simultaneously moving it deeper into military and intelligence systems.

AI regulators........

© Dawn