328 | AI News The week the frontier blinked - Amodei, Altamn, Huang, Zukerberg, Musk, Trump, Xi, King Charles, all played a role this week of September 18, 2026

Isar Meitis (0:00)

Hello, and welcome to a weekend news episode of the Leveraging AI Podcast. This is Isar Meitis, your host. And we had a completely crazy week, or if you want, two weeks, when it comes to AI safety regulation. Are we stopping? Are we not stopping? It was in a very high space with events that are happening every single day, from every angle you can imagine, from the leaders of the labs, to the top politicians, to people in the media, to literally any aspect that you can imagine coming from the US, from the UK, from Europe, from China. So this week we are going to focus on what actually happened in the past couple of weeks and discuss where we are right now, where I think this is going and everything around that. And that might be the only thing we talk about today because I really want to dive deep into everything that has happened. And if we have time, I will mention one or a few rapid-fire items. If not, you can find everything else that happened in our newsletter. There are about 50 other articles that are there where you can learn about other things that happened this week. But what's happening right now from a safety perspective is critical for the future of AI and it might be, and in my opinion, is critical to the future of society and humanity and businesses and so on. And so this is what we're going to focus on. So let's get started.

So, I will start with a very quick recap of the timeline in the past couple of weeks. So on September 3rd, which with everything that happened seemed like a very long time ago, Sanders and KSAR have announced the ban of Artificial Intelligence Act, which is, if you want, was the very first step and it actually started on the top politics side. But we've been talking about slowing down AI for a while now. This is just a political response to this. On September 8th, something that we reported last week, Jacob Coxon resigns from Anthropic after working both on Anthropic and OpenAI and has said that both these companies are reckless. He said specifically, they are racing straight for self-improving super intelligence and gambling with our lives. This is a quote from Coxon. At the same day, the UK has submitted a ban bill to ban super intelligence that it reduced to the UK Parliament at that day. September 9th through the 11th, a dozen plus OpenAI and Anthropic insiders add public warnings and ABC publishes the actual hugging face agent messages, which are really scary in their level to coordinate and basically sacrifice some of them in order for the greater good to be successful. On September 12th, at 10 a.m., Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, publishes a paper he calls We Must Pace the Frontier. To this point, it got over 75 million views, that paper, and he said, and I'll give you a lot more quotes afterwards, but he basically summarized it. We must slow down the pace, which we improve the capabilities of AI models. On September 12th, just an hour later, Musk responds on X saying Dario is right. That's really all he wrote. Also on September 12th, at 12.30, Sam Altman posts on X and he says, I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier, and then he continues later, we will do the same. This is a very big deal from the one reason that Altman and Amodei were not able to agree on anything. They hate each other, they don't even hold hands on big conferences. They will not stand to one another. So they really, really don't like each other. They very rarely agree publicly. And when Altman goes ahead and agrees with what Dario says, publicly within an hour, it tells you how much he believes in what Dario was saying, and saying that they will act the same is, again, telling you how much they're aligned on the way they feel the risk is right now. On September 13th, President Trump and David Sachs post responses, both of them are, well, I'll give you the comments. Trump is completely against, they're saying it's a complete hoax. And Sachs basically said what I've been saying for a very long time, that if they want to stop, they just need to stop. They don't need to wait for everybody's approval. Again, I'll give you exact quotes once we dive into all of this. On September 14th, so another day after that, Altman wrote a much longer follow up, which does not fully align with everything Amodei was saying previously, still aligns with the general concepts, but not with everything he said. He said, again, and I'll give you more quotes, but he said, we do not believe we need to wait for an antitrust exemption, which is one of the things that Amodei was suggesting. On September 14th, again, the same day as Altman post, Trump goes on Truth Social, and again, names Amodei directly. And he's saying that it's criminal and regulatory power over those companies in order to not allow them to slow down. And that's while at the same time, Trump was on speakerphone at the All In Summit together with Jensen Huang, who called him from stage and he said the same things. It said it's a hoax and that we're not going to stop. And Jensen said the same thing. And so, two very powerful people that said that. To me, the biggest shock of all of this is that Jensen Huang can just call Trump and he will pick up. But more on that later on. Still on September 14th, we get two things. One, we get a senior researcher, Bilal, Bilal Chukhtai, who is from DeepMind, who says, I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all. And at the same day, China's foreign minister responds and says they're not going to slow down. And this is all just a race and it's a trick and that they're not going to be aligned with it. Still on September 14th, 70 plus UK Parliament, people from the Parliament write to the prime minister backing the super intelligence ban bill. Separately, at the same day, Microsoft AI CEO Mostafa Silliman publishes a draft of what he's calling the Humanist AI Code of Conduct, basically their way on how to align future AI models. On September 15th, Musk was at the All In Summit and Huang, that was clearly against this whole slowing down thing because his entire business depends on selling more and more chips. So he has a vested interest, but he's also a very smart person. So I won't say it's completely derived by his wish to make more money. But he said, we don't need any new laws. We don't need new regulations. And again, President Trump agrees with him 100 percent.