The Great AI Slowdown? Not buying it?

In 2007 Al Gore won his Nobel Prize for predicting the Climate Apocalypse. Then Obama fired up the Dems program to go "Green". Remember the Green New Deal championed by Kamala and her buddies. Meanwhile China was calling on all nations to follow their lead on Green technology.

AI is the same story repeating itself? I had Claude generate a graph of CO2 emissions below. Yep, China is leading the way...in polluting the earth.

The Great AI Slowdown?

Nothing is now stopping Anthropic and OpenAI from ‘pacing the frontier’ on their own.

By The Editorial Board, The WSJ

Sept. 13, 2026 5:44 pm ET

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The calls by four American tech CEOs for a slowdown in AI development is a big economic and political moment, though to what end isn’t clear. China isn’t about to slow down its AI leaders, while America’s political class may try to seize the moment to stop or take control of the technology. Caution is advised about what the cautioners propose.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei issued a statement on Saturday calling for the slowdown amid the escalating progress of Anthropic’s Claude and other AI models. Sam Altman of OpenAI and ChatGPT quickly agreed, as did Elon Musk, who runs SpaceXAI, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis. The four compete in AI development, so their simultaneous warnings are striking.

“Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence—not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up,” Mr. Amodei wrote.

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The concerns are over the technology and the politics. The entrepreneurs are worried about episodes when rogue AI agents have broken free of their human instructions to pursue their own ends. The recent raid by OpenAI agents on the Hugging Face platform is the most notable, but others are occurring as the machines learn to teach and improve themselves.

This “misalignment,” to borrow the industry jargon, is a genuine concern. These pages have featured warnings about this, and Cameron Berg is the latest nearby. It’s an important argument. Humans need to be able to keep control of the machines.

The CEOs can also see how the politics of AI are moving toward panic. The opposition to data centers based on misinformation is one signal. They can also see the plaintiff bar circling in wait for an incident when rogue agents do more harm than the Hugging Face event.

The warnings of Apocalypse are also growing, often uninformed and amplified by those like Bernie Sanders who want government to stop the industry until the politicians can run it. By offering to slow down on their own, and invite outside monitors to inspect their models, the CEOs are hoping to head off such an outcome.

But then nothing now is stopping these firms from “pacing the frontier” on their own, to use Mr. Amodei’s phrase. OpenAI and Anthropic are leading the frontier. If what they see in their shops is truly dangerous, by all means be responsible and “align” development. Slow down on your own.

The complication comes when these firms seek outside help to aid their cause. One ever-present risk is regulatory capture, in which government rules entrench market leaders—in this case especially OpenAI and Anthropic. If Mr. Amodei wants to bring in an outside referee for its models, go right ahead. But nonprofit monitors come with their own biases and business ties. We should be wary of entrenching them as de facto regulators for everyone.

The same caution goes for rewriting the product liability or antitrust laws to let the firms cooperate to define and police the AI frontier. Some cooperative leeway might be warranted. But “pacing the frontier” shouldn’t become a market-share protection racket.

Mr. Amodei also calls for global cooperation on “pacing within democracies,” which is fine. But the main problem here is China, which is the only real competitor to the U.S. models. AI critics want President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to start an AI arms-control process when they meet this month.

That would be nice if it were realistic. No doubt China doesn’t want to end the human race, but the Communist Party does want to become the dominant global power. It’s worth engaging China to discuss AI’s risks to humanity, especially among technologists.

But Mr. Xi lied when he told Barack Obama that China would end its cyber attacks on the U.S., and China still won’t come clean on what really happened at the Wuhan virology lab. Beijing’s propaganda engines are currently feeding the opposition to data centers in the U.S. Mr. Xi is likely to see a U.S. slowdown as an opening to take the AI lead rather than an opportunity to help mankind.

Giving up the frontier lead could also leave the U.S. vulnerable to rogue states or non-state actors that try to use AI to create a bioweapon or other menace. Anthropic to its credit is calling out that risk, and working to protect against it. The Pentagon needs access to that tech leadership.

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These caveats aren’t intended to dismiss the risks from AI, especially given its rapidly growing ability to train itself. But there are also enormous risks from ceding U.S. leadership to others. The effort to reduce the first shouldn’t increase the latter.