The Week AI Asked to Slow Down and Washington Refused
This week
On Wednesday an Anthropic researcher resigned and said AI could kill everyone by 2030. On Saturday Dario Amodei published an essay urging the industry to slow down, and within hours Altman, Hassabis and Musk agreed. On Monday President Trump called the whole thing a hoax. Underneath the noise, three things changed for you: Meta gave an agent your card, California wrote rules for children's chatbots, and Medicare's AI started delaying treatment.
📡 Industry pulse — 60 seconds
- Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned on Wednesday, posting that the people building AI believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.
- Dario Amodei published an essay on Saturday titled "We Must Pace the Frontier". Within nine hours Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk had all endorsed it.
- Altman went further, matching Amodei's pledge to embed outside evaluators inside his company to verify safety practices. Critics called the move too little, too late.
- President Trump rejected new guardrails on Monday, calling the warnings a hoax and naming Amodei. Nvidia's Jensen Huang told him a slowdown would not be allowed to happen.
- Microsoft started putting xAI's Grok inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint on 12 September, for selected business customers.
- Legal AI firm Harvey reached a $15.5 billion valuation, close to double its figure nine months ago, on more than $1.55 billion raised.