The company asking pays over a billion dollars a month for computing power. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌
 
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
The Last Page.
The last page, first.
 
Dario Amodei Asked the AI Race to Slow Down
Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed within a day, and the chip stocks fell on Monday morning. The essay asks for three things.
The story
Dario Amodei runs Anthropic. On Sunday he published an essay called Pace the Frontier, asking the leading labs to slow down.
He wants three things. Outside evaluators with standing access to the labs, a shared standard among democratic governments, and the authoritarian ones brought in later.
The plan has a hawkish half. Amodei wants no powerful AI chips or chipmaking equipment sold to China. He also wants a crackdown on smuggling and on remote access to data centers. He argues that combination widens America’s lead over the next three to five years.
The request on pace stops where the money begins. He asks for time to align and safeguard models before release. Sam Altman and Elon Musk both said they agreed, inside a day.
Futures dropped Sunday night. On Monday the chipmakers led the market down and the cybersecurity names went up, because a safety rule is somebody else’s product.
Jim Cramer spent Monday on television questioning the whole manifesto. In Forbes, John Tamny argued he protests too much.
The Register read the same essay and called it the terms of regulatory capture. Jensen Huang of Nvidia had already given the other answer on his last earnings call. Compute is revenue, he said, and demand is accelerating.
Anthropic keeps paying about $1.25 billion a month for computing capacity while the essay circulates. The essay does not ask that number to come down.
3
Steps in the plan: evaluators, a democratic standard, then everyone else.
5 percent
How far Nvidia had already fallen in the week before the essay.
$1.25 billion
What Anthropic itself pays for computing power every month.
The frontier
Industry shorthand for the newest and most capable models, the handful at the leading edge. Pacing the frontier means slowing how fast those get smarter, which is a different question from how much hardware gets bought.
Best case
JUNE 2027.  The evaluators got in. Two labs gave outside teams standing access, and a release slipped by six weeks because a test came back wrong.
Nothing about the money changed. The same chips went into the same halls on the same schedule. A slower frontier still needs every processor it can get.
Washington took the democratic standard and wrote it into procurement rules. Allies signed up because the alternative was writing their own.
Your fund held the chipmakers through all of it. The Monday selloff looked, in hindsight, like a misread sentence. No correction was ever printed.
Worst case
MARCH 2027.  The pledge turned into a press release. Evaluators got a sandbox and a schedule, and the models shipped when the marketing calendar said they would.
The standard hardened into a licence. Three companies could afford the compliance, and the fourth one sold itself to one of them.
That is the outcome The Register named on day one, and the one that costs you the most. Competition is what drags prices down, and there was less of it.
The spending never paused for a single quarter. Your power bill kept paying for the halls, and the safest labs were also the biggest.
How it ends
You get the same buildout at the same speed, unless an outside evaluator gets inside a lab before the next release.
Monday sold the wrong noun. The essay is about how fast models get smarter, and the chip bill is about how much hardware gets bought. Those two numbers have never moved together.
Huang put it plainly on his last call. Compute is revenue, and the demand comes from several labs scaling at once. The Monday move priced a sentence about capability as though it were an order cancellation.
The slowdown and the export ban sit in the same document, which is why the capture reading has teeth. The company making the request pays $1.25 billion a month for computing capacity. It has not asked for that bill to shrink.
Take the argument seriously anyway. Three men who compete with each other agreed on a restraint in public, inside a day. That almost never happens, and it is worth watching for what it costs them.
Words are cheap and access is expensive. A lab that lets strangers examine an unreleased model has given up something real. Booking a visit costs a morning and proves less.
Watch the door, and let the pledges alone.
The last page, first.
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The hinge
The hinge is access. Watch for the first announcement that an outside team examined a model before the public saw it. The name of the team has to be attached. Until a door opens, the pledges are a position paper with three signatures.
The Last Page.
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