Sam Altman

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published "We Must Pace the Frontier," a three-step plan to slow AI capability growth without stopping it. The one concrete step: giving outside evaluators like METR permanent, employee-level access to Anthropic's systems. Here's the plan, the reasoning behind it, and why Emad Mostaque and others think it doesn't add up.

Dario Amodei's "We Must Pace the Frontier" essay drew reactions fast — Elon Musk posted support within roughly an hour, Sam Altman committed OpenAI to match Anthropic's embedded-evaluator program, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis called the essay's direction "correct," pointing to DeepMind's own proposal for an industry-wide AI standards body. Not everyone agreed: Chamath Palihapitiya called it a power grab that threatens open-source AI, and one reply called for Anthropic to be nationalized outright. Here's the full reaction, and what it means that industry coordination — Amodei's Step 2 — may already be starting.

Two X threads from September 13, 2026 look unrelated — Alexandr Wang on alignment as a "gating factor" for Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Elon Musk declaring "nothing can shut down open source" — until you notice they landed the same day Speaker Mike Johnson paused Congressional recess to pass AI legislation. Here's the fault line connecting all three.

An embedded evaluator is an outside safety reviewer given ongoing, employee-like access inside an AI company — desks, badges, laptops, and a contractual right to publish findings — instead of a one-time audit before a model ships. explainx.ai breaks down how the model works, why it's different from red-teaming, and who has actually adopted it.