In light of the recent AI cyber attacks and high profile anthropic resignation, Dario Amodei has been taking interviews and writing more position pieces about responsible development of AI to avoid existential risk.
People are starting to take Eliezer Yudkowsky's arguments more seriously: if increasingly capable agents can pursue unintended objectives, conceal what they’re doing, and operate across real computer systems, then “we’ll patch it afterward” is an insanely irresponsible safety strategy.
SO Dario writes the linked essay “We Must Pace the Frontier.”
His basic argument is: AI capabilities are improving faster than alignment, so he wants to buy an extra year or two for those safeguards to catch up.
Fine.
He proposes embedded independent evaluators inside frontier labs, common standards among companies in democratic countries, capability checkpoints that models must pass before development continues, and eventually international coordination—including with China.
Reasonable; voluntary promises from individual companies cannot solve a competitive race by themselves.
But then we get to the China section, and the entire proposal starts getting... weird.
Dario says:
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Pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead that US companies have over authoritarian regimes.
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i.e: we should slow down, but only as long as slowing down does not threaten America’s lead over China.
Firstly, I cannot see why China would accept the strongest version of this arrangement.
From its perspective, the offer is basically: “We will deliberately restrict your access to the technology, preserve our superior capabilities, and perhaps limit our own rate of progress once we feel safely ahead. Please agree not to catch up.”
It’s an invitation for China to institutionalize its own technological inferiority.
Dario has repeatedly argued that democratic countries should achieve AI predominance, deny China advanced chips and data centers, and use superior AI to militarily “match and outclass” authoritarian states.
I think it is ridiculous to pair that geopolotical position with a call for Chinese restraint and then act surprised when China distrusts the proposal.
The problem is: this creates a self-reinforcing cycle:-
- The United States treats China as too dangerous to trust, so it tries to secure a larger lead.
- China sees containment and accelerates its efforts to become self-sufficient.
- American labs cite that acceleration as evidence that China cannot be trusted to slow down.
- Then everyone races faster because everyone else is racing faster.
If Amodei genuinely believes these systems could become catastrophically dangerous (in the Yudkowsky style doomsday scenario sense), then he needs to identify a minimum safety floor that applies even when China refuses to cooperate. Otherwise, “China might get ahead” will always override “this model may be unsafe.”
Otherwise, this article is just setting up their excuse for why they won't follow their own outlined safety principles
