Why OpenAI And Anthropic Are Pumping The Brakes

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Welcome to Prof G Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is September 15th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices declined with chipmakers selling off on fears of an AI slowdown. More on that in a minute. Meanwhile, CrowdStrike rallied 14 percent as investors piled into cybersecurity stocks. Brent Crude remained elevated at $105 per barrel. And finally, the yield on 10-year treasuries topped 5 percent for the first time in three years. We will be discussing that news tomorrow.

Okay. What else is happening? The AI apocalypse debate intensified over the weekend, and both Anthropic and OpenAI have now officially weighed in. On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei published an essay titled, quote, We must pace the frontier. He wrote that we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. He also warned that within six to 12 months, a swarm of rogue AI agents could take over the entire Internet with a persistent botnet. Sam Altman also posted, quote, I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. And Elon Musk concurred, posting, quote, Dario is right. Altman also told Fortune that OpenAI will not go public in 2026, calling this, quote, an ill-advised moment to go public. The White House, however, is not on board with slowing things down. President Trump, speaking to reporters in Ireland on Sunday, said, quote, whoever wins, AI wins, and called the people raising these alarms, quote, negative forces. Still, a slew of AI-adjacent companies sold off on Monday on concerns that a slowdown would impact AI spending. NVIDIA closed down 3 percent, Oracle was down 4 percent, CoreWeave down 7 percent, and SoftBank, which is a significant investor in OpenAI, closed down 15 percent. So here to break down what all of this means, we're speaking with Charlie O'Neill, Co-Head of Model Training at Baseten. Charlie, thank you for joining us again on Prof G Markets.

You work in AI, you are an AI developer, you work with these models, you've been in this game a long time. Suddenly, everyone is very upset about this.

It's interesting how the debate has evolved, but we're now reaching a place where the leaders of these AI companies are saying, we need to actually slow everything down, which I'm not sure many people would have predicted. And now it's the president, President Trump, saying, no, that's the wrong approach, we need to speed things up.

Where do you land on this? What is your perspective?

Charlie O'Neill (3:50)

It's really interesting to see the reaction to something that's kind of been like, I guess like linearly scaling for a long time in terms of the calls for pacing the frontier from people such as Dario and Sam. I think the best way to view what they're actually asking for is not necessarily, we're going to put a halt to capability development, we're going to put all these stringent checks and like first party things that is throwing us down. The best way to view this is we are going to keep advancing the capabilities of the models, we are just going to allocate a little bit more compute to making sure those models are safe.

It is very interesting to see the sell-offs and so on today. OpenAI and Anthropic are planning on spending more compute probably than they were a few weeks ago. There's rumors that OpenAI is going to allocate up to 20 percent of internal compute for monitoring and safety. So as they're doing these training runs, as they're deploying these models in the real world, things like the hugging face incident, they don't want to happen again. So if you allocate more compute to monitoring those models as they're doing their rollouts and as they're doing inference, then you're more likely to catch it. Anthropic is similar and some people suggest that it's going to be a much higher than 20 percent figure.