The Frontier

Critics challenge the independence of METR, the third-party evaluator backed by Anthropic. Holly Elmore notes METR's close ties to the safety ecosystem, including shared offices and personal relationships with OpenAI and Anthropic personnel.

David Sacks argues that OpenAI and Anthropic should unilaterally pace development due to product liability risks instead of lobbying for regulatory capture. Sacks asserts the market already penalizes unreliable models, making safety a standard business objective.

Jason Calacanis criticizes Anthropic and OpenAI for failing to control internal communications regarding existential risk claims. He suggests that AI companies should establish strict communication protocols and penalize rogue, panic-inducing employees by stripping their stock options.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei published "We Must Pace the Frontier," arguing that AI companies must deliberately slow their rate of capability advancement. Dario Amadei claims recursive self-improvement has accelerated dramatically since the summer of 2026.

Tech leaders Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Demis Hassabis endorsed Dario Amadei's call to pace the frontier. Both Anthropic and OpenAI committed to granting independent, third-party safety evaluators employee-level access to scrutinize unreleased models.

Krystal Ball highlights that Anthropic claims an 80 percent profit margin when excluding model training costs. This financial reality gives AI labs a strong incentive to slow development to make their pre-IPO balance sheets look more attractive.

Saagar Enjeti notes that Chinese state media criticized Anthropic's pacing proposal as a Cold War tactic aimed at maintaining semiconductor export controls. However, China faces its own massive vulnerabilities, exemplified by a zero-click WeChat worm breaching over one billion users.

Jacob Coxon argues that AI executives and senior researchers privately fear the technology could cause human extinction by the end of the decade. Coxon resigned from Anthropic to publicly sound the alarm on these unvoiced industry anxieties.

Anthropic maintains an internal culture where employees and integrated AI systems debate long-form essays over Slack. These discussions cover existential and geopolitical threats, such as China stealing AI weights, alongside minor operational optimizations.

Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger validated Jacob Coxon's warnings, stating there is a greater than 10 percent chance AI will destroy humanity. Hubinger argues that working inside these labs is the only viable way to make the models safe.

OpenAI and Anthropic are locked in a heavily subsidized price war, extending subscription limits and trials. SemiAnalysis reports the labs are taking massive losses, with OpenAI providing up to $14,000 of monthly token value for a $200 subscription.

An Anthropic researcher resigned after six months, warning that competition is driving companies to build self-improving AI models. He estimates a greater than 10% chance that AI will cause human extinction within the next decade.

Sacks argues that the viral resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon was a coordinated public relations campaign funded by Effective Altruism groups. The effort aims to panic the public to justify a centralized federal AI regulator.

Sacks links the amplification of Coxon's viral warnings to three safety groups funded by Jan Tallinn, a co-lead investor in Anthropic's Series A. These groups are actively lobbying for federal oversight and California's SB 53 bill.

Anthropic safety executive Evan Hubinger publicly endorsed Coxon's warning, stating there is a greater than ten percent chance of AI causing human extinction within the decade. This internal validation undermines typical corporate pushback against critics.

Chamath argues that internal warnings of civilization-ending risks create severe product liability for Anthropic's upcoming public offering. Sacks notes that investors cannot underwrite a multi-trillion-dollar valuation while the company's safety lead calls its core technology unsolved.

Adam Curry argues that Anthropic is systematically using existential risk warnings to lobby for AI regulation and protect its market position from open-source alternatives. This marketing strategy serves to restrict platforms like Hugging Face before Anthropic's initial public offering.

Anthropic reported blocking distillation attacks from Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Xiaomi, who used fraudulent accounts to extract reasoning traces. Moonshot also routed nearly 300,000 user queries to Claude Opus to collect data.

Anthropic blocked a grant application in May that sought to conduct gain-of-function research on the chikungunya virus at a military institute. The researchers continued attempting access through gray market resellers after being banned.

Anthropic used AI in September 2026 to complete a formal computer verification of Fermat's Last Theorem in 11 days. AI models have also resolved other historical mathematical problems like the Jacobian conjecture.

A Yemeni threat cell used Anthropic's Claude to code flight control and navigation systems for guided rockets. The actors bypassed human software engineers by assigning specific development roles to multiple AI instances.

In March, Anthropic's Claude Mythos model gained superhuman hacking capabilities on par with the NSA and Mossad. The Trump administration subsequently issued an export control shutting down access to its sister model, Claude Fable, within ninety minutes.

Sun highlights a widespread belief among Silicon Valley elites that AI will inevitably create a permanent economic underclass. OpenAI and Anthropic are actively hiring sales teams to persuade enterprises to replace human workers with digital agents.

An Anthropic employee's public exit over existential AI risk was an orchestrated media campaign designed to trigger regulatory capture. David Sachs argues that coordinated media coverage and political reactions aim to build regulatory barriers that protect closed labs while stifling open-source models.

SpaceX AI is planning a second gigawatt-scale data center campus in Texas, replicating its Colossus facility in Memphis. The expansion positions SpaceX AI as a commercial neo-cloud provider capable of renting compute to players like Anthropic and the Pentagon.

While Anthropic and OpenAI lobby for strict regulations on model distillation, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argues open-source distribution is safer. Huang warns that restricting technology to a US duopoly creates a single, vulnerable point of failure.

Anthropic economist Peter McCrory argues AI has caused no material increase in US unemployment. McCrory characterizes current AI as a skill-biased, labor-augmenting technology that boosts productivity because human expert oversight remains essential to resolve model limitations.

Theo and Ben argue that OpenAI and Anthropic are cutting profit margins to compete for API dominance. Ben suspects OpenAI's recent price cuts on Soul, Luna, and Terra were side effects of optimizing Astra to match Fable's price.

Matt Barrie highlights a massive 500x cost spread between premium Western models and open-source Chinese alternatives. Running his daily agent workload would cost $80,000 on Anthropic Opus, $1,300 on Claude Sonnet, and just $150 on Chinese models like GLM 5.3.

Matt Barrie warns that the $1.65 trillion AI data center buildout resembles the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis. Unlike subprime, which was supported by 55 million mortgages, this debt rests almost entirely on just two customers, OpenAI and Anthropic.