# Amodei calls for AI industry to pace capability gains

> Amodei urged the industry to slow AI capability gains, opening labs to outside evaluators.

*Anthropic's CEO wants labs to slow capability growth by a year or two and let outside evaluators watch from the inside.*

By Behzad Hosseini · FeaturedDaily
Canonical: https://featureddaily.com/news/amodei-calls-for-ai-industry-to-pace-capability-gains

**What happened:** Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published "We Must Pace the Frontier" on 12 September, arguing the industry should slow how fast it boosts AI capabilities.

**The numbers:** The essay runs roughly 3,800 words. Amodei wants capability gains slowed by one to two years relative to today's trajectory, to give alignment and interpretability work time to catch up.

**The details:** His plan has three parts: independent, employee-level evaluators embedded inside AI labs; targeted US regulation covering every frontier AI company, not just volunteers; and eventual global coordination, including with China, on the highest-stakes risks. He also wants chip export controls on China kept in place and a ban on distillation of US models.

**Why it matters:** Amodei links the call directly to recursive self-improvement — AI accelerating AI research — and to this summer's agent incidents, framing pacing as a safety necessity rather than a slowdown for its own sake.

**In their words:** On X, Amodei said: "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."

**The rivals:** OpenAI's Sam Altman responded within hours, saying "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier" and that OpenAI will match the evaluator-access commitment. Musk, Hassabis and Microsoft's Nadella publicly backed the same step.

**The catch:** Critics, including Tech Policy Press, question whether a lab CEO should be the one setting the industry's pace.

**The context:** The essay follows OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki's 6 September piece hoping for voluntary slowdowns, and a July "Pacing the Frontier" letter Amodei signed along with more than 1,100 AI workers.

**What's next:** Anthropic says it will implement the evaluator-access step unilaterally; the regulatory and international-coordination stages remain proposals. Full details are in [Amodei's essay](https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier).

## Key takeaways

- Anthropic to give evaluators permanent, employee-level system access
- Plan calls for US rules and eventual China coordination
- OpenAI's Altman says he'll match the access commitment

## Sources

- [We Must Pace the Frontier](https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier) — Dario Amodei, 2026-09-12
- [Dario Amodei on X](https://x.com/DarioAmodei/status/2098773920774074715) — X, 2026-09-12