Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing frontier AI development in an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” outlining a three-step plan: Anthropic unilaterally giving embedded, employee-level access to third-party evaluators like METR to verify safety practices and report incidents; frontier labs in democratic countries coordinating on shared safety standards and speed limits, requiring antitrust waivers from government; and eventual global coordination, including with China, on pre-release testing and limits on recursive self-improvement (RSI). Within two and a half hours, OpenAI’s Sam Altman publicly agreed his frontier lab would adopt independent evaluators. President Trump rejected the idea, telling reporters “we're leading China in AI... and, frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins,” and calling the broader safety debate something pushed by “negative forces.” David Sacks told Amodei and Altman to “go ahead” and pace themselves but stop pretending they need antitrust waivers or a regulatory approval process, and stop treating METR, which he called intertwined with Anthropic's investors and staff, as a neutral referee. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg argued no industry pact is needed, citing Meta's own delay of its Muse launch as proof it can be done unilaterally. For crypto natives, Amodei's essay sounded familiar, evoking Sam Bankman-Fried, with FTX-era effective altruism language of existential risk giving cover to the idea that a single