Former Trump adviser and artificial intelligence and crypto czar David Sacks endorsed an industry slowdown of AI development but rejected the altruistic framing of the move by industry leaders.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call on Saturday for the AI industry to self-impose a slowdown of development has gained steam after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreed with the call, along with other industry leaders such as Elon Musk. Sacks voiced measured support for the move in a lengthy post on X but flipped the framing on its head, arguing that the two weren’t acting in good faith.
“You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement,” he wrote. “I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.”
“But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier,” Sacks added.
“Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic,” he continued, arguing that Altman and Amodei were only acting because their product faced massive liability exposure if it enabled a major cyberattack.
Sacks said the market already punished models that behave in “unpredictable or unauthorized ways” and has begun punishing Anthropic and OpenAI, which he suggested was actually what led to the call to slow down. Trading “raw power for reliability and predictability” was “simply good business” for Anthropic and OpenAI following the damaging Hugging Face cyberattack.
“So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it,” he concluded. “If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.”
Regulatory capture is the concern that oversight will ultimately entrench leading tech giants and lock out smaller competitors, with critics arguing that well-funded tech companies often advocate federal regulatory frameworks to insulate their own market dominance, stymie entry for open-source competitors, and shield themselves from liability.
The sudden discussion around the ethics of rapid AI research was launched last week after former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon publicly resigned from the company, claiming it wasn’t acting responsibly and that continued research without regulation posed an existential danger. He went on a media circuit this weekend, even agreeing with his former boss on his plan for a slowdown.
“It seems like a great plan for addressing domestic slowdowns. So for the frontier laboratories in the West to slow down, but I would guess that part of my worry was that I feel we need international coordination, or else we risk running the same race with China, which could be equally dangerous,” he told NBC News’s Meet the Press.
Not everyone is convinced of the genuineness of Coxon, Amodei, and Altman, with Sacks only being the most visible.
Parker Thayer, a researcher with the Capital Research Center, noted the coordination with pro-regulatory groups and others to spread Coxon’s resignation letter. Writer and researcher Kevin Bass also noted the connection with advocacy groups, mainly with Coefficient Giving.
Online critics argued that Coxon’s viral resignation was not an isolated act of whistleblowing but rather part of an astroturfed campaign designed to incite public panic and build momentum for federal regulations.
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Palantir CEO Alex Karp pushed against the call to slow down AI development, saying it wasn’t realistic.
“If we didn’t have adversaries, I would be very in favor of pausing this technology completely, but we do,” he told CNBC News.
