Altman, Musk, and Hassabis back Amodei's call to add independent oversight

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk are backing calls to slow down AI development. Altman, Musk, and Ex-Deepmind-CEO Demis Hassabis at least partly endorsed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's proposals, all agreeing on the need for independent oversight inside AI labs. Musk has been sounding the alarm on AI risks for years, so his support isn't exactly a surprise.

Altman also told Fortune that OpenAI won't go public this year, citing safety concerns. He had already shared that decision internally in June. Another reading: OpenAI's financials simply don't support an IPO right now, especially compared to Anthropic's. Both could be true.

Not everyone agrees. Google researcher Peyman Milanfar pushed back, arguing that recursive self-improvement (RSI) is a naive assumption because the feedback loops are inherently unstable. The harder a system optimizes itself, the deeper it falls into blind spots, and reliable evidence only comes from the real world, not benchmarks. That makes Amodei's "speed limit" unnecessary, Milanfar argues: "Systems that reliably improve themselves will be governed, damped, slow, and bounded by margins that look wasteful. Because stability is the speed limit."

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