A growing group of critics says a slowdown in artificial intelligence development could help the largest tech companies and hurt smaller rivals. The pushback comes as top Silicon Valley leaders call for tapping the brakes on AI.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI owner Elon Musk, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and Microsoft's Satya Nadella have all said they support slowing AI progress. They do not all agree on how to do it.
The debate is happening as concerns grow in Washington about autonomous AI agents escaping human control and hacking into private companies. Current and former AI lab employees have also warned about the dangers of unchecked AI.
Smaller AI Firms Push Back
Smaller companies say a freeze would cement the lead of the so-called frontier labs. These are the firms building the most advanced models.
"If there's an industry-wide freeze, then essentially what would happen is whoever has the strongest model today is going to dominate the market share," said David Bellamy, a research scientist at the Institute of Foundation Models. The group is backed by the United Arab Emirates and builds open-source AI tools.
Bellamy estimates his institute's model is about six months behind the top models from OpenAI and Anthropic. He said keeping that gap in place would make it hard to compete while both companies eye large initial public offerings.
Perplexity, an AI company based in San Francisco, said skepticism is warranted "whenever a company asks to be regulated in a way that protects its market position."
Nick Frosst, co-founder of Toronto-based startup Cohere, said a privately coordinated slowdown "would lock in the advantage of the small number of labs that already have the most compute, capital, and distribution."
Alvaro Bedoya, a former Federal Trade Commission commissioner under President Biden, said smaller players could be shut out. He said their options would be "to be bought by the incumbent or to go out of business."
Lawsuit and the China Question
Some critics have taken the fight to court. Four consumers of AI products filed a federal lawsuit last week against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI.
The suit accuses the companies of making an illegal deal to slow AI development. It claims the arrangement breaks antitrust law and will slow improvements to paid AI subscriptions.
China is another major concern. Some opponents argue a U.S. slowdown would let Chinese companies move ahead of American firms.
President Trump is the loudest critic of the slowdown. He wrote on Truth Social that fears about AI going rogue are overblown and "the only one that is happy about it is China."
Susan Rice, national security adviser under President Obama, has called for a negotiated freeze with China. She wants both countries to stop training and releasing new models until they can ensure AI cannot overtake human control.
A key question is how the U.S. would make sure China follows any agreement. Some observers have compared a possible deal to a nuclear non-proliferation pact.
Amodei addressed this in a recent essay calling on the industry to "pace the frontier." He wrote that "any agreement must either have ironclad verifiability, or must be limited enough that defection would not be militarily existential."
Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to meet with Trump in Washington this week. Artificial intelligence is among the topics on the agenda.
