Amodei's AI pacing essay draws endorsements from OpenAI, xAI, DeepMind heads

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled 'We Must Pace the Frontier' on September 12, 2026, proposing three staged mechanisms to slow AI capability growth: embedded third-party evaluators inside labs with near-employee-level access, democratic coordination among frontier labs requiring a government antitrust waiver, and global coordination including chip export controls and model-weight protections. Anthropic said it is unilaterally adopting the first step immediately, with organizations like METR named as possible evaluator partners. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Elon Musk of xAI, and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind each endorsed variations of the proposal within hours of publication. Separately, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are reportedly forming a shared frontier AI standards group covering independent testing, incident reporting, and auditor standards. Legal analyses from Vinson & Elkins and Holland & Knight identify antitrust hurdles to the coordination Amodei proposed, with Holland & Knight noting that a 2025 joint safety evaluation between OpenAI and Anthropic was limited to publicly released models, which the International Center for Law and Economics cited as evidence that antitrust concerns are constraining deeper pre-deployment collaboration.