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This is the 91st edition of The Web3 + AI Daily - your definitive guide to the intersection of blockchain and AI. Dario Amodei’s call to slow the pace of improving AI capabilities was echoed by both Sam Altman and Elon Musk. However, none of them actually committed to slowing things down.
Thank you for being here! Let’s dive in.
Dario Amodei’s Desperate Attempt to Save Face and Funding
Pacing, But Not Really
On Saturday, Anthropic‘s Dario Amodei published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” with which he proposed a plan to slow down AI development. Yet, just a few paragraphs in, he wrote:
To be fair, ensuring that their models are safe and aligned has always been an expectation of AI labs. Alongside repeatedly assuring the public that they are taking the necessary precautions, all of them have invested significant sums in AI safety initiatives and continue to maintain dedicated safety and safeguards teams. What is new here is allowing independent third-party evaluators to verify those efforts.
More precisely, Amodei’s plan consists of:
Giving ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators, “whose role is to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes.”
Coordination between frontier AI companies within democratic countries to establish common safety standards.
The US and other democratic countries coordinating with authoritarian governments.
Anthropic actually committed only to the first step of this plan, and OpenAI's Sam Altman did the same.
Amodei cited METR as a third-party evaluator Anthropic can potentially use - the same organization that investigated the OpenAI - Hugging Face incident, and whose CEO, Elizabeth (Beth) Barnes, is a former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employee. As Timnit Gebru and Greg Linares suggest, it's extremely misleading to present METR as an independent experts or auditors:
Coordination Within Democracies
On step 2 of his plan, Amodei argues that a coordination between democratic countries’ frontier labs and actual pacing of AI development will be possible only after step 1 is performed en masse:
“Once embedded evaluators are operating within a critical mass of US AI companies, then verifiable pacing becomes more viable. In particular, it becomes possible to pace based on detailed properties of models or training pipelines.”
The most effective tool to achieve a real slowdown, Amodei hints, is regulation targeting all US frontier labs. In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, he went as far as suggesting that people bear the responsibility to ask for regulation. Check out what Luiza Jarovsky, PhD commented:
Over the last couple of days, OpenAI also called the US Congress to introduce mandatory national AI safety requirements, while Altman reportedly delayed the company’s IPO over safety concerns.
Yet, let’s not forget a few important details:
Both Amodei and Altman have repeatedly advocated for regulations in public, while fiercely lobbying against them in private.
Reports that OpenAI was considering postponing its IPO to 2027 have been circulating around since May / June, citing cautious market conditions and SpaceX’s stock volatility as main reasons. Framing safety as the primary concern now looks less like a sudden change of course and more like a convenient way to ride the current wave of AI-safety rhetoric.
A $2 Trillion IPO
While pushing his competitors and the entire AI industry to “slow down,” Dario Amodei goes ahead with his plan to debut Anthropic on the stock market. The five-year-old company that hit $65B in annualized revenue in July will look for a $2T valuation as early as October. Read this sentence again.
In that context, Amodei’s essay appears even more suspicious and hypocritical. It reads as: “AI may indeed kill us all, but give me $2T to keep building what I’m building, and I promise to let a few ostensibly independent experts check my work.”
Some commentators have even suggested that by publicly signaling a willingness to slow things down, Anthropic could give investors a convenient explanation for why it has failed to meet its targets.
Even Trump’s AI Czar Told Them Off
It came as a real surprise to me, but David Sacks, Trump’s crypto and AI czar, put both Amodei and Altman in their place. He called them out for portraying METR as independent, lobbying for regulatory capture, and, most importantly, pretending that they are somehow forced to pursue AGI.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. 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.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. 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 you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Matt White also chimed in:
No statute is required for Anthropic and OpenAI to trade a few months of raw capability for reliability after Hugging Face. That is just product-liability management dressed up as moral philosophy.
What they want instead is the package deal: embedded evaluators they already know, a permissioning regime that treats open and trailing labs as the real risk, and a story that antitrust has to step aside so the two frontier houses can coordinate the pace. METR-as-independent-auditor only works if you ignore the staffing and investor overlap. An “FDA for AI” only works if you ignore that the people defining dangerous capability are the same people who would be licensed to sell it.
It’s high time we stopped treating every word from Elon, Sam, or Dario as prophecy and started reading AI doomerism for what it increasingly appears to be: a strategy for generating hype, resisting regulation, and positioning themselves as uniquely qualified to confront the dangers they themselves create.
It is also becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the possibility that OpenAI and Anthropic may be acting in tandem. After extracting unimaginable amounts of creative work to train their models and securing billions of dollars from institutional investors and governments, they are now preparing to collectively raise as much as $3 trillion from the public. We should not allow this to happen.
Finally, I’ll leave you with a reminder: if you’re looking for a safer, more equitable, and privacy-preserving approach to AI, you’ll find serious efforts to achieve that within the decentralized AI movement. I invite you to subscribe and join me as we continue exploring its evolution.
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