(The Epoch Times)—Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is calling on artificial intelligence companies to slow the development of their most advanced models, a proposal that has drawn support from several other industry leaders.
In a lengthy essay published Sept. 12, Amodei said that simply investing in risk prevention is no longer enough. Instead, he said companies developing frontier models should deliberately slow the rate at which they increase their capabilities.
Doing so, he said, could give researchers and governments more time to develop safeguards before AI systems become too powerful.
“I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,” Amodei wrote.
“Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” he added.
One of his main concerns is AI’s growing ability to help build the next generation of AI systems.
That process, often called recursive self-improvement, has accelerated since roughly the summer, Amodei said. He warned that AI-assisted research could eventually outrun human capabilities to manage AI systems.
“Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems,” he wrote.
Industry Leaders Back Proposal
In a rare moment of unity, leaders and researchers at rival AI companies rallied around Amodei’s call.
“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X, adding that OpenAI would match Anthropic’s commitment to give independent evaluators employee-like access to its systems.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceXAI, also backed Amodei on Sept. 12, writing on X: “Dario is right.”
Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said his company was launching an “open alignment initiative” and asked to participate in efforts to give independent evaluators deeper access to AI labs.
Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher and former OpenAI and Tesla executive, also endorsed the proposal.
“I love this and really hope we can come together as an industry and make it happen,” Karpathy wrote on X.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis had not publicly responded to Amodei’s proposal by the time of this publication. He has, however, previously called for greater outside scrutiny of frontier AI.
A 3-Step Plan
Amodei proposed a three-stage framework for “pacing the frontier.”
The first would give independent safety evaluators permanent, employee-like access to frontier AI companies. Anthropic said it is willing to adopt that measure itself and asked other major developers to follow.
The second step would require frontier AI companies to coordinate on common safety standards so that one company is not placed at a competitive disadvantage for slowing down.
The third—and arguably most difficult—would involve making agreements with China to prevent an AI race in which developers feel forced to advance faster than safety measures can keep up.
Amodei said governments would likely need to become involved, both to establish enforceable standards and to address legal concerns surrounding cooperation among competing companies.
China Complicates Any Slowdown
Any industry-wide slowdown would face a major geopolitical obstacle: the U.S.-China tech race.
Amodei argued that U.S. companies cannot simply slow indefinitely if Chinese developers continue advancing at full speed.
“Pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead that U.S. companies have over authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party,” he wrote.
Amodei called for tighter restrictions on advanced AI chips and measures to prevent the theft or copying of leading U.S. models. At the same time, he said that Washington should eventually seek agreements with Beijing on at least some AI safety issues.
Even limited cooperation, he said, could give both sides more room to slow development when dangerous capabilities emerge.
The proposal attracted the attention of members of Congress.
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) wrote on X that he is “studying” Amodei’s proposal, which he called “a reasonable start” that “takes seriously” the need for measures that can be enacted quickly.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), meanwhile, expressed skepticism on China’s willingness to cooperate. “Will China?” he wrote.
The prospect of an AI slowdown could emerge as a topic when President Donald Trump meets China’s Xi Jinping in Washington later this month. Trump has confirmed that artificial intelligence will be among the issues the two discuss.
“[Chinese leader] Xi is coming over on September 24th, and we talked about [artificial intelligence] when I was over in Beijing, and we’ll be talking about it again,” Trump said in July.
The United States and China are also preparing for a broader dialogue on AI, expected to address issues including cybersecurity, advanced models, and the risks posed by increasingly autonomous systems.
For Amodei, international competition does not eliminate the need to slow down.
Instead, he argued, it makes coordination increasingly important.
“The benefits will only be achieved if we build the technology in the right way,” he wrote.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
