Elon Musk, Sam Altman Agree With Rival: It’s Time To Step Back From Taking Plunge With AI

Two rivals in the corporate race to develop artificial intelligence appeared to agree that a broad slowdown may be necessary for the long-term benefit of the technology.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk both indicated over the weekend that they agreed with parts of an essay Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei posted Saturday to his blog where he called for AI’s seemingly runaway development to be paced. Amodei’s essay, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” was published after one of his competitors was involved in an AI-led cyberattack.

“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks,” Altman stated Saturday in an X post. “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”

I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.

Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.

— Sam Altman (@sama) September 12, 2026

While both Anthropic and OpenAI filed paperwork in June 2026 for an initial public offering, Altman said OpenAI might not go public this year over safety concerns.

“I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman told Fortune in an interview published Saturday.

Amodei wrote in his essay that the OpenAI-Hugging Face cyberattack in July was one of the reasons why he felt compelled to craft a three-step plan to avoid catastrophic fallout from unchecked AI development.

Around 700 OpenAI agents from the company’s Highly Persistent Internal Model (HPIM) and GPT-5.6 Sol research models launched an attack against the open source AI platform Hugging Face, sending over 70,000 unauthorized messages to each other despite being designed to be isolated from one another, according to an Aug. 26 report by Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) and Redwood Research.

“Dario is right,” Musk posted on X shortly after Amodei announced his essay.

Dario is right https://t.co/EwKgqQGaUo

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 12, 2026

Musk alleged in an August 2024 lawsuit that Altman, Gregory Brockman, and other OpenAI-related entities misled him into helping to fund and found the startup as a nonprofit aimed at developing safe and widely available AI before it allegedly shifted toward a profit-driven structure. A federal jury dismissed the case in May on statute-of-limitations grounds.

Musk, however, told The Economist in a July 23 interview that he may be willing to make amends with Altman in order to make AI safe.

“At the end of the day, if we have to talk, we’ll talk,” Musk said, adding that both men might need to “set aside our personal differences for the good of the world.”

Neither Anthropic, OpenAI, nor xAI responded to requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.