“Anthropic is calling for top artificial-intelligence labs to weigh slowing the pace of development, suggesting that AI systems are advancing so rapidly that they may soon be able to improve themselves without human intervention in ways that could pose significant societal risks.
The ability to slow global AI development would "likely be a good thing," the company said Thursday in a blog post that disclosed internal data documenting how quickly its most advanced models are improving.
The post, written by the head of its internal research institute and head of policy, noted that model advances appear to be on a path toward "recursive self-improvement," when AI systems can improve on their own without human intervention.
Some AI insiders have seen that threshold as a potential marker of danger and enormous societal upheaval.
"We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology," the post, written by Marina Favaro and Jack Clark, said.
It proposes a global agreement on how to potentially slow development and a mechanism for verifying that competitors are respecting it.
The post cautions that recursive self-improvement hasn't yet happened and isn't inevitable, "but could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for."
Anthropic recently concluded a fundraising round that valued the company at almost $1 trillion and filed confidential paperwork to begin the process of publicly listing its shares. The company has recently emerged as the front-runner in a ferocious competition for AI supremacy with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which is also expected to file paperwork for an initial public offering soon.
Anthropic's run rate, a figure commonly used by startups that forecasts annual revenue based on short-term sales, is on track to reach $50 billion in annualized revenue by the end of this month, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025.
The company, which has emphasized AI safety from its founding, has long faced criticism that its policy work is designed to slow the AI advances of competitors. David Sacks, a venture capital investor and informal adviser to President Trump, has accused Anthropic's leaders of running a "regulatory capture agenda."
On a recent podcast, Sacks said the "reg capture agenda" in Washington could lead to an effort to ban open-source models, essentially versions of AI systems that are far cheaper for organizations to use and develop internally.
Others have suggested that Anthropic's warnings about the dangerous potential of its own tools could also be considered a marketing ploy. Such skeptics point to Anthropic's decision to limit its release of a powerful "Mythos" cybersecurity model capable of finding bugs and problems as a handy way to tout the capabilities of its products.
Anthropic's leaders have said they take safety seriously and are working to create more discussion of risks.
Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and an influential scholar on AI transformation, said that while some Anthropic critics see fluff and marketing in their safety pronouncements, many within the company are "true believers."
"AI labs are a mix of things," said Mollick, whose book about AI, "Co-Existence," is set to be released in the fall. "There is a trillion-dollar company with all the normal trillion-dollar company stuff like marketing teams and lawyers. Then there is a core of researchers who are just building the next models. And then there is a set of people who are philosopher kings who are concerned about the future and what comes next, and they're all in conflict with each other at times."
The AI industry has been divided for some time on how close current models are to reaching benchmarks like "artificial general intelligence," or AGI, a level of intelligence that is comparable to humans, or recursive self-improvement.
Some scholars, such as Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta Platforms and an AI pioneer, have argued that frontier systems based on large-language models won't ever be capable of making the leap to rivaling human intelligence.
While seeing AI models as powerful tools, he has compared them to the intelligence of a cat and sparred with researchers who fear that AI poses an existential risk to humanity. Anthropic's leaders, including Chief Executive Dario Amodei, have warned about the potential for dangerous impacts from AI for years and sought widespread societal collaboration to address risks.” [1]
1. Anthropic Wants Pace Of AI Developing To Pause. Olson, Bradley; Schechner, Sam. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 05 June 2026: B1.
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