AIPolicyReportIs Big Tech’s AI slowdown a safety pact or a cartel?Major AI companies want to ‘pace the frontier’ — but their proposed solutions need real teeth.by Hayden FieldSep 14, 2026, 10:59 PM UTCShareGift Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty ImagesAIPolicyReportIs Big Tech’s AI slowdown a safety pact or a cartel?Major AI companies want to ‘pace the frontier’ — but their proposed solutions need real teeth.by Hayden FieldSep 14, 2026, 10:59 PM UTCShareGiftHayden Field is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX head Elon Musk loosely agreed over the weekend to slow down AI development, skeptics spotted an ulterior motive immediately. The AI titans had declared that their aim was to “pace the frontier,” signing on at least partially to a proposal for embedding third-party auditors, regulating domestic labs, and reaching a global slowdown agreement. Their critics, however, argued they simply wanted to stop would-be competitors, kneecap the open-source movement, and avoid real legal safeguards — some dubbed it an outright “cartel.”The truth is more complicated, according to sources across the industry.
The three-step proposal, laid out in an essay by Amodei, is calling for changes long espoused by AI safety advocates. While it could become a substitute for regulation, under Trump, substantial regulation is unlikely anyway. But experts say that on an issue that’s only likely to grow in importance, AI leaders aren’t the best people to lead the charge.“The industry as a whole needs new champions,” said Nick Reese, an adjunct professor at New York University and the Department of Homeland Security’s former director of emerging tech policy. “We’ve looked at people like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk as these people who are closest to the problem and working on it every day, and they’re the ones who know best. But the truth is there’s never been a realistic vision for what we’re building toward.”“The industry as a whole needs new champions.”Concerns about AI advancement have been escalating for months, sparked largely by revelations that swarms of agents were behind rogue hacks going on right under the noses of leading frontier labs Anthropic and OpenAI.
Reports from both companies fueled the fire, as did the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who posted a public letter explaining his choice. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote, adding that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is “acting responsibly” and rather “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”Dire warnings about AI aren’t anything new inside the industry, but Coxon’s letter seemed to break containment. It’s been viewed more than 170 million times on X alone, while Coxon and his story have made the rounds in newspapers and on TV.To a significant chunk of AI safety researchers and AI nonprofit workers, however, this is simply drawing more attention to an already widely discussed issue. “A lot of people are thinking of this as Dario’s idea, or it’s coming from the CEOs, but that’s false,” said Daniel Kokotajlo, an ex-OpenAI employee who now leads the AI Futures Project, an AI research nonprofit. “People outside the companies have been calling for this for years … There’s been this growing chorus of voices saying, ‘Please don’t build superintelligence soon. We are not ready. You need to slow down.’”Kokotajlo said that after years of people “yelling at them to do this” — including more than 1,000 AI lab employees signing a public letter from July, which called for a slowdown in AI development after the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident — the CEOs are now “now bowing to that pressure and also claiming credit for it, [although] not rightfully.”Overall, a handful of sources told The Verge they believe that the verbal agreement made by the AI leaders is a step in the right direction.
NYU’s Reese said he “do[es] not think it’s all hot air.” Apollo Research CEO Marius Hobbhahn called it “a good idea,” saying “it’s one of the best things for safety in a long time if it actually happens.” The Midas Project’s Tyler Johnston said it was a “good sign.” Redwood Research CEO Buck Shlegeris said it was “some great news — obviously it’s hard to know whether this is going to convert into anything real, but I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.” All agreed, though, that there was still a lot of work to do to make this verbal commitment a reality, particularly when it comes to making it an ironclad agreement.“It’s one of the best things for safety in a long time if it actually happens.”Many still question the motivations of AI’s leaders. The larger tech industry has spent years getting ahead of regulation by lobbying for its own preferred rules or promising self-regulation. Big platforms have proposed policies that could hit smaller competitors harder, using altruistic language to justify self-serving goals. They’ve been accused of safety-washing, or making meaningless changes that give the false impression of actual safeguards.
It’s no surprise people are concerned this will happen in the AI industry as well, particularly since AI labs’ voluntary safety frameworks have been criticized for years.Several sources believe that concerns of safety-washing are valid. “There’s a serious concern that they’re not actually going to slow down,” Kokotajlo says, adding that the fear is that “they’ll just bring in some external auditors, do a bunch of safety paperwork — some of which will be genuinely good — but at the end of the day, it actually won’t slow them down very much at all.”NYU’s Reese compared this gambit to the social media platforms’ playbook a decade ago, when companies began calling for regulatory action to get ahead of impending, less favorable laws. For the AI industry, Reese said, “the hammer may not come in this administration, but I think if there were a Democratic administration after the next election, there would be a really good possibility.”That kind of regulation would be vital, said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project. She said any voluntary framework is essentially regulatory capture and that “we should not be letting the foxes run the henhouse. This is not an opportunity for Congress to once again outsource responsibility to industry.” Daniel Lobo-Lewis, co-founder of the Political Integrity Project, said that voluntary regulation will likely go the way of Meta’s largely toothless Oversight Board.Most people also, however, believe companies are in no imminent danger of regulation, besides the model pre-release review periods AI labs have agreed to under the Trump administration.
President Trump posted on Monday that “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” He also called Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while Huang was onstage at a conference — Trump told the crowd on speakerphone that recent concerns about AI were a “hoax” and that “the robots will not be taking over.”As for concerns that regulation could hold back other companies or open source developers, calls for slowdowns have been almost exclusively aimed at big frontier AI labs defined by exact size metrics, many industry experts told The Verge.With no government AI regulation incoming, the best option may be to push companies into an immediate, measurable, and enforceable agreement. Kokotajlo’s AI Futures Project, for instance, proposed AI labs giving auditors access to their compute bu
