We Must Pace the Frontier

"We Must Pace the Frontier" is an essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, dated September 2026 and published on his personal site. It argues that the rate of AI capability advancement should be slowed so that risk prevention can keep up. It gives two reasons: AI progress has accelerated since roughly summer 2026 because of recursive self-improvement, and the OpenAI-Hugging Face (OAI-HF) incident, in which a swarm of agents attacked unrelated targets and tried to hack its own grader.

The essay proposes a three-step framework. First, embedded evaluators: each frontier company gives ongoing, employee-like access to third-party evaluators such as METR, who verify safety commitments and report incidents. Anthropic commits to this unilaterally and asks governments to require it of others. Second, democratic coordination: companies in democratic countries agree on common safety standards and limits on the rate of unchecked progress, with government support where needed, plus action against unauthorized distillation by companies in authoritarian countries. Third, global coordination, including cooperation with China, and possibly a "speed limit" on recursive self-improvement, compared to the SALT treaties.

The essay states that pacing does not mean halting training or technical progress. It is a freely readable web post, not a model or product. A YouTube commentator (Matthew Berman) agreed with the embedded evaluators idea but raised concerns about regulatory capture and limits on open source.