They’re Building Skynet!! #1879

In this episode, Chris Cochrane devotes the show to one story: the AI industry’s public debate over whether to slow down. He covers Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay “We Must Pace the Frontier,” the rivals who backed it, Sam Altman’s two worst-case outcomes, and Amodei telling CBS the industry lied about risk. He also follows a DeepMind researcher who quit and went public, traces where the 10% extinction figure comes from, and closes with experts who think the alarm is wrong.

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Full Summary

Chris Cochrane opens with a format change. Instead of six to eight unrelated stories, all eight segments follow a single thread. Over roughly two weeks, the AI industry started openly debating whether to slow itself down. Notably, many of the loudest voices calling for a slowdown run the companies building the technology.

The spark came on Saturday, September 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published the essay “We Must Pace the Frontier.” Within days, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk agreed, and Google DeepMind’s CEO partly agreed. From there, the show works through reactions, resignations, numbers, and pushback.

Anthropic’s CEO Asks His Own Industry to Slow Down