Anthropic CEO Amodei Proposes AI Safety Plan as Industry and White House Split on Regulation

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has proposed a plan to “pace the frontier” of AI development, a move that has drawn both industry support and pointed criticism while exposing deep divisions over how—or whether—to regulate the technology.

The proposal, described by TechCrunch and The Verge, calls for three steps: embedding independent third-party safety evaluators inside AI labs, coordinating development across the domestic industry, and forging international agreements—potentially with government assistance. The plan comes roughly a week after an Anthropic researcher’s doomsday warning rattled the AI world, according to TechCrunch.

Amodei’s proposal has already picked up some industry backing, along with “pointed pushback” from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, TechCrunch reported.

Over the weekend, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk publicly seemed to agree on aspects of all three steps, The Verge reported. Anthropic and OpenAI had been hinting that they and other labs were working on some kind of industry framework, according to The Verge. Appearing pro-regulation looked like both a good PR move and, potentially, a way for companies to address fallout from progressively more concerning hacking incidents, The Verge added.

**Opposition from Meta and Nvidia**

But the AI world is not united. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg quickly came out against limiting companies’ autonomy, The Verge reported. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Zuckerberg, Musk, and Huang scuttled proposals for an industry-funded independent regulator for AI—akin to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a private nonprofit regulator in finance.

Zuckerberg posted on X that “Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens,” according to The Verge. Meta pointed to that post when asked for comment.

**OpenAI pushes for government role**

OpenAI, however, is not giving up on the idea of regulation. “People want to know AI is being developed safely,” Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s global affairs chief, told The Verge. “That begins with the steps companies like ours take on our own, but government has an important role too. The AI policy window is open, with growing bipartisan support for mandatory national safety standards for frontier AI. Congress should turn that momentum into a framework that strengthens safety, supports American innovation, and keeps the U.S. leading in AI.”

An AI venture capitalist, who requested anonymity due to current investments, told The Verge that regulation was necessary, drawing parallels to safety standards for cars, airplanes, and electricity: “You see these moments in every technology, where, at some point, the industry had to come together to find a way to say, ‘How do we collectively embrace what safety means?’ … But the early days are always a little wild and unruly, and that’s how technology unfolds.”

**White House rejects safety crisis**

Any government involvement in the process looks like a non-starter under the current administration. According to The Verge, the Trump administration has attacked the idea of a safety crisis in AI, calling it a “hoax.” President Donald Trump called Huang while the latter was onstage at a conference and told a crowd over speakerphone that “The robots will not be taking over.”

Trump also posted on social media that “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” He added that the administration already has “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies” and denounced a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and data centers, warning “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

Nick Reese, an adjunct professor at New York University and the Department of Homeland Security’s former director of emerging tech policy, told The Verge that Trump’s current anti-regulation stance is confusing because Reese worked with the first Trump administration to develop Executive Order 13960—which Trump signed and has not been repealed. The order centered on creating principles for federal AI use to protect “privacy, civil rights, [and] civil liberties.”

“Six years ago, the Trump Administration signed executive action on AI safety, so there is a real change in the president’s position on the topic,” Reese said. “AI safety requires more than the intellectual abilities of one elected official.”

Reese described the administration’s positions on AI regulation as “wobbly and inconsistent,” The Verge reported. “The result of that is that we are now framing AI safety in this doomsday scenario where the robots are coming to get us. But framing it as ‘robots are coming to get us’ really distorts what the core problem actually is. The core problem is that we have AI that is not physical or embodied in a robot that is hurting humans now.”

AI-industry blogger Zvi Mowshowitz told The Verge that Trump isn’t necessarily fully anti-regulation—he did slap some restrictions on frontier labs, like pre-release testing by the government—but is driven more by “vibes” than consistent policy. “Trump’s not yet buying this ‘existential risk’ thing, that’s ‘negative forces,’” Mowshowitz wrote.

**Industry response uneven**

Anthropic declined to comment, but Amodei wrote in his essay that the company has “always … advocat[ed] for well-considered regulation of AI, even when this gets us accused of hype, ‘doomerism’, or regulatory capture,” The Verge reported. Safe Superintelligence Inc., SpaceX, and Google did not respond to a request for comment. Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment.

The core question, as TechCrunch’s Equity podcast hosts noted, is whether companies can agree on what slowing down means—and who gets to police it. With the White House rejecting the safety narrative and key industry figures split on self-regulation, the path forward remains unclear for both tech regulation and the investment landscape tied to it.