Artificial Intelligence

AI Executives Want International Regulation. They Could Just Slow Down Themselves.

Dario Amodei is calling for coordinated international limits on AI development while Anthropic prepares to go public.

Tosin Akintola | 9.14.2026 4:54 PM

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei doesn't want to stop his competitors' progress; he just wants to slow it down. 

In an essay released this past weekend, Amodei outlined a plan to coordinate a global slowdown of AI development to ensure "companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models," overseen by "third party evaluators." While he admits that "some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing are legally challenging, and will require government support," Amodei states that for the regulatory regime to work, America and "other democratic governments" must "attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible."

It's a naive sentiment that betrays the pie-in-the-sky nature of Amodei's request for regulation. Worried about Chinese models outpacing Anthropic's, Amodei suggests the U.S. ban the sale of powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, crack down on chip smuggling and model distillation, and restrict remote access to data centers outside China. He also ambitiously calls on the U.S. and China to agree to "test their models before release for acute risks in areas such as cybersecurity, biology, and alignment," which could be done through a "global standards body." However, even Amodei admits that giving this body "real teeth will be a challenge, and the difficulty will be in verification that both sides don't have secret models which........

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