As Silicon Valley executives call for a slowdown in the development of artificial intelligence, a growing chorus of critics has coalesced around a counterargument: halting the advance of AI will consolidate the power of leading tech companies and kneecap their upstart rivals.
The debate comes as concerns mount in Washington about autonomous AI agents escaping human control and hacking into private companies, just as current and former employees of AI labs issue dire warnings about the dangers of unconstrained AI.
Tapping the brakes on the rapid progress of AI is now something Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI executive Sam Altman, SpaceXAI owner Elon Musk, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and Microsoft's Satya Nadella all say they support — though they don't all share a common vision for accomplishing it.
But smaller AI firms say an AI slowdown will only cement the advantages of the companies at the forefront of the industry, often called frontier labs. And other skeptics say pausing AI development would only work with the cooperation of China, which is far from guaranteed.
"If there's an industry-wide freeze, then essentially what would happen is whoever has the strongest model today is going to dominate the market share," said David Bellamy, a research scientist at the United Arab Emirates-backed Institute of Foundation Models, which develops open-source AI tools.
Bellamy estimates that the institute's AI model is about six months behind OpenAI's and Anthropic's most advanced models. He argues that keeping that gap in place will make it hard to compete in a moment when both OpenAI and Anthropic are eyeing blockbuster initial public offerings.
Alvaro Bedoya, former Federal Trade Commission commissioner under President Biden, said a freeze could make the playing field more uneven by putting pressure on smaller companies in ways that could prove ruinous.
"When powerful incumbents lock up the market, the rivals, the upstarts, the scrappy players in that market, can no longer compete on product or quality and service," Bedoya said. "They are just locked out. And the options available to them are to be bought by the incumbent or to go out of business."
In statements to NPR, some middle-of-the-pack AI companies said they fear a freeze would hobble their businesses at a time when competition is as fierce as ever.
Perplexity, a San Francisco-based AI company, said skepticism is warranted "whenever a company asks to be regulated in a way that protects its market position."
Nick Frosst, co-founder of Toronto-based AI startup Cohere, said "a blanket, privately coordinated slowdown is not a neutral safety policy, it would lock in the advantage of the small number of labs that already have the most compute, capital, and distribution, while making it harder for researchers, startups, and other labs to compete."
Other critics are pushing back in the courts.
Four consumers of AI products filed a federal lawsuit last week accusing Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI of making an illegal deal to slow the pace of AI development. They allege the arrangement violates antitrust law and will slow improvements to paid AI subscriptions."
Then there is the looming China question.
Some opponents of an American AI slowdown argue that it would allow Chinese companies to speed past American AI firms.
President Trump is the loudest voice against a Silicon Valley AI slowdown, writing on Truth Social that fears about AI going rogue and endangering humanity are overblown and "the only one that is happy about it is China."
Susan Rice, who served as national security adviser in the Obama administration, has pushed for a negotiated freeze with China to stop the training and release of new models until both Washington and Beijing can ensure that leading AI cannot overtake human control.
"America should aim to win the A.I. race, provided that the race can be won safely. Ultimately, we have more in common with our fellow humans in China than the A.I. agents who might control us all," Rice wrote recently in The New York Times.
China's Xi Jinping will be meeting with Trump in Washington this week, with artificial intelligence among the many agenda items.
One persistent question has been how the U.S. would guarantee that China would comply with a slowdown, even if the two nations agreed. Some observers have compared a U.S.-China pact to a nuclear non-proliferation agreement.
In Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's recent essay calling on the industry to "pace the frontier," he recognized that Chinese cooperation was a potential wrinkle in any global agreement to slow down.
"Global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities," Amodei wrote. "Therefore any agreement must either have ironclad verifiability, or must be limited enough that defection would not be militarily existential."
Anthropic is a financial supporter of NPR.
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