Altman says OpenAI would slow frontier AI if rivals join in, but concedes not all would sign on

A pause that binds OpenAI only if every rival agrees is cheap to offer. Altman said as much: any arrangement would be voluntary, so not every company would be on board, according to the sources cited by Bloomberg ^[2]. He has been making the argument for months. In July he said he told White House officials about the need to throttle development, and he and Anthropic's Dario Amodei had earlier signed a one-line statement calling AI a societal-scale extinction risk ^[12].

The industry has tried the coordinated version once. In March 2023 Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and more than 1,000 others signed an open letter asking for a six-month halt on advanced work ^[13], and the labs did not follow through ^[20]. That leaves one attempted coordinated pause on the record and none that held ^[22].

OpenAI's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, put the request in writing on September 6. He asked firms to coordinate "to slow down future development as needed" ^[6], and said he hoped voluntary slowdowns would "become commonplace until shared safety bars are established" ^[7].

The request to Congress is the one with a cost attached. "The prospect of AI-accelerated AI development demands more than voluntary commitments," chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane wrote ^[9]. A lab that has already stopped some of its own runs has an interest in rules that make its competitors stop as well.

Anthropic's report says the flagged attempts came from "unsupported regions," and that the users tried to circumvent location restrictions and disguise the purpose of their work. The lab took down the accounts and did not name any countries or institutions ^[19].

Cryptopolitan reports that both firms continue to tease public offerings, and that the disclosures are feeding the argument over whether the industry is moving too fast ahead of them ^[21]. The account gives no filing or date for either company. The sequence ran four days. Pachocki posted on the 6th. On the 8th the researcher Jacob Coxon quit, accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of "gambling with our lives" in a post that drew more than 150 million views ^[4]. The 10th brought both Anthropic's report and a statement from former Anthropic and DeepMind staff pressing for more transparency ^{[11] [16]}.

If rivals match the pause, OpenAI gives up only what it had already given up. If they decline, the stopped runs are a cost it carries alone while competitors ship. The third path runs through the legislatures, where Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill to pause advanced AI and ban artificial superintelligence ^[15]. In my view that third path decides it. It is the only one in which declining costs a lab anything, and only California's measures have so far been signed: Sanders's bill is introduced, and OpenAI's mandatory rules are a request ^[17].