AI BOSSES BEG SOMEONE TO SLOW THEM DOWN, PRESIDENT SAYS NAH

Dario Amodei runs one of the companies building the most powerful AI on the planet, and on Saturday he published an essay asking the industry to please stop doing that so fast. It's called "We Must Pace the Frontier," and it argues labs must slow the pace at which they improve model capabilities. The sales pitch is bleak, Amodei wrote that a capable enough swarm of AI agents could take over the internet with a persistent botnet within six to 12 months, with damage potentially reaching hundreds of billions of dollars. His opening move: Anthropic will give third-party evaluators permanent, employee-level access to its systems. Then came the part nobody saw coming. Altman said he agrees and that OpenAI will give independent evaluators the same access. Musk, who sells Grok on having fewer restrictions, posted three words: "Dario is right." Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis nodded along too. Washington did not nod. Trump, talking to reporters at the Irish Open at his own golf resort, said the US is leading China and "whoever wins AI wins." He also claimed he came up with the expression. He blamed "negative forces" for raising things he says won't happen. Speaker Mike Johnson ruled out a moratorium because "China will overlap us," and said tech companies should lead on safety themselves. Kevin Hassett said the bigger worry is a "malevolent actor" having better AI than ours. Obama, meanwhile, told Democrats at a private fundraiser to put AI regulation at the center of their agenda. Everybody is certain, nobody agrees.

Why you should give a shit: The guys building the botnet risk are asking for a speed limit and the guys who'd have to write one are busy citing China, which leaves the entire safety plan sitting at one blog post and a couple of nice replies on X.