The ‘AI Slowdown’ Is Good For Tech CEOs, Not For You

Over the summer, the populist cry for a global AI “pause,” which started among small activist groups, was taken up by senior AI CEOs and left-leaning politicians. This weekend, AI industry leaders are now suggesting a coordinated “slowdown” of frontier AI research and capabilities and giving the tech to a collection of democratic nations.

This would not only require direct coordination between top AI companies and oversight by government bodies, but it would also give them a solid advantage over open-source competitors, cementing a practical duopoly.

This is crony capitalism in the agentic age, dressed up as altruism, and designed to halt the efforts of the open-source AI community.

“(S)ociety must have a say in how this technology is used, and more time for the necessary public deliberations — which pacing the frontier would bring us — is surely a good thing,” wrote Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, maker of the popular Claude platform.

Amodei’s comments were echoed by Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at both Anthropic and OpenAI, who resigned with a dire warning about the state of AI progress. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote on X, a tweet thread that has now been viewed close to 200 million times.

As many have noted, an obscure tech worker has posted on social media and is getting catapulted overnight into the role of the ultimate AI doomsayer, cited by most senior politicians in industrialized nations calling for broad AI regulation. Some former colleagues at both OpenAI and Anthropic supported his comments online, and Coxon hit the Sunday news shows to reiterate his expertly crafted warning.

The Big AI Firms Are Kicking The Door Shut

It is no secret that both OpenAI and Anthropic are in the finishing stages of major IPOs that could be the largest in history. They are also the two most advanced companies building AI models in an otherwise crowded field of closed-source and open-source competitors. If anyone profits from a slowdown, it would be them — not the millions of consumers now integrating AI models and chatbots into their workflow.

Take Amodei’s suggestions seriously — embedded third-party evaluators inside frontier labs, government regulation of AI progress, coordinated global oversight — and they produce a predictable outcome: a deeply entrenched AI sector. Only well-capitalized, closed-source labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, with the lawyers and government relationships to navigate compliance, could keep pace. Everyone else gets stunted while the giants move forward.

Don’t Blur The Lines Between Open and Closed-Source

Open-weight models released by Thinking Machines, Google, NVIDIA, and Chinese companies like Kimi, Moonshot, and Deepseek are not built with the same guardrails. They would be put at an immediate disadvantage. In the worst-case scenario, open models would be restricted or curtailed, something that has already been suggested by several senators in Washington who want to limit China’s influence.

This is where the difference between closed and open-source becomes key.

Closed-source models are black-boxed technologies, centrally hosted and controlled by AI companies. Open models, on the other hand, allow users to download them, tinker with context and reasoning, and privately host them on their own machines. Once a developer ships an open model, there are no reasonable measures in place to enforce compliance with users or rein in its use.

The recent purchase of the open model library Hugging Face by top chipmaker NVIDIA was a huge vote of confidence in open-weight models and has given a boost to thousands of open-source AI projects that use the platform to distribute their technology. This kind of deal would let open-source models advance and compete with frontier tech. But only if we allow it.

While some see cautious pacing of AI progress as a means to avoid Hollywood-style apocalypse scenarios, others see it as a clear strategy to build a regulatory moat that would elevate incumbents, which is exactly what’s happening.

More Americans are concerned than excited about the development of AI — which is reasonable — there are real risks in how we proceed. What isn’t reasonable is directing that fear toward a regulation strategy that fortifies Dario and Altman at the top of the sector. Competition and change are America’s competitive advantage in the AI race, and misdirected fear is precisely what could bring about the worst results.

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Yaël Ossowski is deputy director of Consumer Choice Center and a fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute.

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