Ex-White House AI czar tells Anthropic, OpenAI to stop pretending and slow AI

Former White House AI czar David Sacks has hit out at Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman, claiming that they must stop pretending that they need permission to slow down AI development.Former White House AI czar David Sacks wants Anthropic and OpenAI to slow down AI development instead of saying that they need permission to do so. (Photo: Reuters)The past few days have been quite busy in the world of AI. It appears that everyone in the industry, be it Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, or OpenAI chief Sam Altman, wants to slow down AI development. But former White House AI czar David Sacks has now reminded US AI companies that they can simply slow down development on their own, without needing anyone’s permission. Sacks currently serves as Chair of the US President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.On X, David Sacks sharply criticised US AI companies after calls from Dario Amodei and Sam Altman to slow the pace of frontier artificial intelligence development. “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,” he wrote.The former AI czar insisted that there was no need for either of the two companies to ask for an independent system to pace frontier development as they were the ones leading it. “Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel,” David Sacks added. “Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability.” A screenshot of David Sacks' X post. (1/2) He also questioned whether AI safety research non-profit Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) was actually independent. “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. Slowing AI development may give companies breathing roomDavid Sacks further argued that calls to slow development were not purely altruistic. Sacks said OpenAI and Anthropic faced “massive product-liability exposure” if their products enabled a damaging cyberattack, and added that the market already penalised models that behaved in “unpredictable or unauthorised ways.”Referring to the Hugging Face breach – where 700 OpenAI agents tried to hack the US company Hugging Face – Sacks wrote that it was “simply good business” for the two companies to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. “Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want,” he said. A screenshot of David Sacks' X post. (2/2) Sacks added that slowing the frontier could create “breathing room” for a more serious discussion on regulation than US senator Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down” approach, while also arguing that China was very unlikely to join any global agreement. He ended with a warning, “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.” If they did, he said, they would “buy goodwill for the next conversation.” If not, it would look like “another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.”Donald Trump rejects calls to slow down AI developmentSacks’ remarks come at a time when US President Donald Trump has rejected the idea of pacing frontier AI development. Speaking to reporters during a weekend trip to Ireland, Trump played down calls to slow AI development, saying the US had to protect its lead over China. "We can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that ... shouldn't be bringing it up, and they're bringing up things that won't happen,” Trump said. "But whoever wins with AI wins."Later, at his resort in Doonbeg after watching a golfer tee off in the Irish Open, Trump said the US was ahead of China in AI and wanted “to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.”Calls for pacing frontier AI development have grown in Silicon Valley recently. It has also become one of the few topics where Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and tech trillionaire Elon Musk all seem to share a similar view. Following Amodei’s call to slow down development, Elon Musk replied on X, stating, “Dario is right.” In the past, staff members from OpenAI and Anthropic have claimed that at its current trajectory, AI may potentially kill all humans in a matter of years.- EndsPublished By: Armaan AgarwalPublished On: Sep 14, 2026 08:37 IST