Dario Amodei calls for pacing the AI frontier; Lifland argues compute caps beat safety evals

gleech · x · 2026-09-13

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a new essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier," proposing a three-part plan to slow the AI industry. Anthropic unilaterally commits to step one: giving third-party evaluators permanent, employee-level access to its systems to verify safety measures, report incidents, and assess alignment during training.

Researcher Eli Lifland pushed back: he finds Dario's claim that input-based pacing (e.g., capping AI R&D compute) is more gameable than safety-eval-based pacing backwards. Requiring 90% of compute go to external inference rather than R&D seems hard to game, while alignment evals can be gamed and safety-practice judgments are subjective — though he still favors moving toward eval-based pacing.

Related event: Anthropic CEO Calls for Coordinated Slowdown of Frontier AI, Opens Doors to Third-Party Evaluation(131 posts)→

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