The AI industry splits over whether to slow down

Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay calling for a slowdown in AI development, and Sam Altman and Elon Musk both agreed publicly¹¹. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang rejected the idea outright. “We should go as fast as we can irrespective of anybody else,” he told CBS News². He renewed his pushback against AI doomsday scenarios, saying there is a zero per cent chance the world ends in 2030³.

Huang relayed that position directly to President Trump, who telephoned him while he was speaking on stage, and Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg posted his own dissent⁴. The call to coordinate now has legal consequences: Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google have been sued over their calls to pace AI development, with the claim that statements by Musk, Altman and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis amounted to an illegal business agreement⁶.

Why it matters to investors

The company arguing for restraint is also the one heading for a listing. Anthropic is moving ahead with IPO plans amid the safety debate and is expected to generate $100 billion in annualised revenue this year, even as Amodei calls for slowing down^1,12. It has picked Accenture as its first embedded evaluator, a step toward Amodei’s proposal to slow the pace of development⁸, and has pledged to spend $1 billion on the effort⁹.

The dispute is really about who absorbs the liability. Palantir chief executive Alex Karp told CNBC that leading AI labs are quietly pushing to be nationalised to protect themselves from litigation⁷. Semafor framed the split the same way, noting that Palantir’s boss said the firms may need to be nationalised while Huawei’s chair called on Chinese labs to accelerate¹⁰.

What to watch

Altman will brief an open UN Security Council meeting in person next week⁵, which moves the argument from company blog posts to an intergovernmental forum. The antitrust case is the other forcing mechanism, since a finding against coordinated pacing would remove the mechanism the slowdown camp is proposing⁶.

For the capex cycle, the practical questions are whether the embedded-evaluator model spreads beyond Anthropic^8,9, and whether Anthropic’s listing timetable survives the safety argument its own chief executive is making^1,12. Huang’s and Zuckerberg’s positions suggest the largest spenders have no intention of slowing^2,4.