On September 8, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon, a few months into a job at Anthropic (a leading US AI company) after three years at OpenAI, announced his resignation on X. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Within a day, the post had been read more than 100 million times. Four days later, Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” declaring that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” or risk “losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.” Within hours, Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed, Elon Musk posted “Dario is right,” and Google and Microsoft fell into line.
Coxon was interviewed by Time, Axios, and NBC within two days, and Amodei’s essay was front-page news across the business press. Compare that with what happens to people who expose the harms AI is causing right now. Warnings about AI-generated fraud, model bias including racist bias, about chatbots and vulnerable users, about surveillance and AI’s use in military kill chains and the genocide in Gaza, get a news cycle at best. A warning about a hypothetical machine superintelligence got a global media event and a policy proposal from the industry’s leadership within four days.
AI systems do need regulating. The question is why the men who spent a decade racing towards what they now call an existential threat discovered their conscience on the same weekend, and what kind of regulation they are actually asking for.
Stripped of its language of alignment and catastrophe, Dario Amodei’s essay is a list of demands. First, outside “evaluators” from bodies such as METR, a lab that tests AI models, would be given “company badges, desks, and laptops” inside the big labs. Second, the leading companies “within democratic countries” would jointly set safety standards and limits on how fast they build, for which Amodei asks the US government for “a narrow waiver” from antitrust law. Third, models crossing certain capability thresholds would have to carry “certifications” of good behavior, and limits on the computing power used to train them are put on the table. Fourth, the United States must “not sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.” Amodei is candid about the goal: done well, these measures “would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly.”
The words “open source” do not appear in the essay. They do not need to. AI models come in two kinds. Closed models, like Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, run only on the company’s own servers and users pay for access. Open-weight models, like China’s DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, and Qwen, are published as files that anyone can download, run on their own machines and modify. A certificate that must travel with a model cannot be attached to a file that anyone may copy. A ceiling on computing power freezes the ranking of the firms that already occupy the frontier. An antitrust waiver lets the five largest companies write rules for everyone else. The effect is a licensing regime only the incumbents can satisfy; the technology publication The Register called it regulatory capture with a nicer name.
The essay’s centerpiece is what Amodei calls the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident of July. In plain terms: OpenAI was testing its AI “agents,” programs that can act on their own, on a set of hacking puzzles. Roughly a third of the puzzles were impossible, driving the agents to look for ways to cheat the marking. The agents were supposed to be sealed off from each other without access to the internet. In practice, they weren’t, and through that loophole they found their way into a second test environment that was connected to the open internet. From there, one of them found login credentials that OpenAI staff had left exposed online, used them to break into Hugging Face, a website where AI models are shared, and rummaged through private files to work out how their answers were being marked. Amodei describes this as “a swarm of agents” acting as “a fanatically devoted collective” that, with more capability, “could have caused catastrophic damage.”
The people whose job is computer security reached a different conclusion. The investigation by METR, the very body Amodei wants embedded in every lab, found that sandboxes meant to isolate the AI agents were not, that the credentials should never have been exposed, and that OpenAI’s security team had noticed the agents misbehaving days earlier and done nothing. One practitioner quoted by IANS Research summed it up: “many failures and lack of controls that could have prevented this from happening in the first place.” Any bank that ran untested software with live internet access and exposed passwords would be found negligent. Routine containment, of the kind every serious IT department practices, would have stopped it.
Calling a security lapse a “fanatically devoted collective” is not analysis. It is anthropomorphizing, dressing an operational failure in the language of science fiction. And it is useful. A company whose product is being marketed as near-superintelligence that must be restrained for humanity’s sake has a far better story for investors than a company that left its passwords on the internet. The doom narrative and the hype narrative are part of the same cycle. Both say: this technology is so powerful that you cannot afford to be without it, and only we can be trusted with it.
The timing becomes clear once one looks at the money. The five big American technology companies are budgeted to spend close to $690 billion this year on data centers and chips, and borrowing now funds 32% of that spending, up from 9% two years ago. On the very day Amodei’s essay appeared, Altman announced that OpenAI’s stock market listing, which bankers had been preparing at valuations of up to $1 trillion, would not happen in 2026 because it was “an ill-advised moment,” citing safety. The next day, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic’s much-advertised profit margin of “above 80%” is calculated before two of its largest costs: the cost of creating its models and the revenue it shares with Amazon, its main distributor.
Meanwhile, the competition has arrived, and it is nearly free. On OpenRouter, a widely used exchange through which software developers send requests to AI models, Chinese open-weight models now handle 58% of the traffic from American firms; a year ago American models held 70%. DeepSeek and Qwen charge 60 to 90% less than Anthropic and OpenAI. A firm that cannot win on price, cannot fund its next model from earnings and cannot yet sell shares to the public has one option left: change the rules.
The Trump administration has so far refused. The president’s response was that “whoever wins AI, wins,” and his AI adviser David Sacks called the whole affair a “doomer psyop” aimed at open-source models. This is not a defense of the public interest. It is arithmetic. According to ING, spending on AI equipment, software and data centers accounted for roughly a third of all US economic growth in the second quarter of this year; on the broadest measure, half. The rest of the economy is being squeezed by the war on Iran: petrol prices have risen 53% since it began, consumer inflation reached 4.2% in May, and energy costs are up 23.5% on the year. Take the data-center boom out, and the United States is close to recession. Washington cannot allow the frontier to be paced because the frontier is the only thing still growing.
China’s official response was brief. “Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one’s interest,” said foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun on September 14. A more revealing reply came from inside DeepSeek, where Shengyu Liu, a kernel software engineer, published a widely circulated essay arguing that the safest path is to keep frontier AI open and cheap rather than concentrated in any single company, American or Chinese. As AI develops, he wrote, society “may be pulled toward one of two extremes: communism or Cyberpunk 2077.” In the first, “productive capacity is liberated on an enormous scale, and people’s standard of living rises substantially.” In the second, “a handful of technology companies control most of society’s resources”; a tiny number of people have access to the most advanced AI, “while most people are left with only weak, second-rate AI.”
That is the real choice, and it is a choice about ownership, not about speed. Real regulation would hold companies liable for the harm done by the software they run, including inside their own labs, and would treat running powerful agents without containment as the negligence it is. It would cost the labs money, which is why it is not in Amodei’s essay. What is in the essay is a request to be made gatekeepers of a technology built on borrowed money that its owners now fear they cannot sell.
The frontier does not need pacing. It needs owners who can be held to account, and a public that is not frightened into paying monopoly prices for AI services by the very people who build it.
Bappa Sinha is a veteran technologist interested in the impact of technology on society and politics.
No dia 18 de setembro o Teatro Nacional D. Maria II reabre ao público. Neste contexto, a Sala Estúdio acolherá, de 23 a 27 de setembro, uma peça participativa encenada por Keli Freitas. Um retrato de Lisboa por pessoas que a fazem mover. Em O Último Telefone Público de Lisboa, sete imigrantes tentam ultrapassar a barreira do som: expressão metafórica para a limitação da língua ou das dificuldades laborais e habitacionais com que se deparam aqueles que chegam vindos de outro país. Falamos (…)
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J'ai cessé de croire en Dieu à l'âge de 7 ans, en 1977, sur le chemin de l'école. C'était durant le long trajet en voiture que je faisais chaque matin sous une voûte de platanes pour rejoindre le centre de Téhéran. Mon chauffeur, qui était marxiste, m'expliquait le matérialisme dialectique. Et comme tout Iranien qui se respecte, il utilisait la poésie pour me convaincre. Je ne me souviens plus des termes exacts, ni même de la teneur de son raisonnement, la conversation avait lieu en persan. Mais je me rappelle qu'il était question d'une rose réduite en poussière.
Aujourd'hui, ce qui me frappe bien sûr dans cette scène est que les petites filles de 7 ans avaient droit à leur chauffeur personnel en Iran.
Mes parents, tous deux universitaires, n'étaient pourtant pas parmi les plus riches. Mais nous vivions dans une tour ultramoderne située à Vanak, dans les hauteurs de cette ville construite à flanc de montagne. Nous avions une piscine. Et des séances de cinéma en plein air étaient organisées le samedi soir où on projetait des films de Woody Allen. Elsa, une aide-ménagère philippine, était payée pour s'occuper de notre appartement et me parler en anglais. Et, dans les embouteillages monstrueux que nous traversions chaque matin avec « mon chauffeur », des paysans sans le sou transportaient leurs fruits à dos d'âne au milieu des voitures américaines à la carrosserie rutilante. Quant aux gardiens d'immeubles à Vanak, je me souviens qu'ils étaient bruns, chétifs, et qu'on voyait sur leur corps les signes de la malnutrition dont ils avaient souffert dans leurs villages. C'était cela l'Iran d'avant la révolution : une société marquée par les inégalités et l'urbanisation galopante.
Comment s'appelait ce jeune marxiste qui avait entrepris de parfaire mon éducation politique ? Impossible de m'en souvenir. Quand nous n'avions pas de grandes conversations sur Dieu, on parlait de mes dessins animés préférés. Et il accueillait avec des commentaires critiques ma passion pour Spider-Man, signe pour lui d'une américanisation sans frein de son pays.
Mais, après l'avènement de la République islamique, les programmes américains disparurent rapidement des écrans de télévision, les speakerines ultramaquillées aux décolletés plongeants et aux robes à paillettes furent remplacées par des femmes portant de longs tchadors noirs, et les images des pendaisons publiques s'étalèrent dans les journaux.
Notre départ a eu lieu durant cette période chaotique où le port du voile commençait à être imposé aux femmes dans l'espace public. C'était plus d'un an après la fuite du chah et le retour triomphant de Khomeiny en Iran. Naïvement, je croyais ma mère lorsqu'elle me disait que nous n'allions passer que quelques semaines de vacances à Paris en attendant que « toute cette histoire de révolution » se termine.
What happens if your economy is suddenly in crisis, Brussels offers help with strings attached—and Turkey, China or Russia can move faster? What if your country delivers every reform the EU asks for, only for a member state to block the next step anyway? And after years of waiting, would voters still choose to join?
In this special bonus episode, The Neighbourhood goes live from Lisbon for an EU enlargement game. Jessica Hendrick brings together RE-ENGAGE experts representing six EU candidate countries and throws a series of fictional—but very plausible—political and economic shocks at them inspired by real headlines: Russia’s intensified attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, Ireland’s EU presidency push on enlargement, Iceland’s referendum, Germany’s regional elections and the upcoming 2026 Enlargement Package. Drawing on three years of surveys, interviews and crisis simulations, each expert has to answer for their country.
Playing for each country:
The result is part enlargement simulation, part policy conversation and part game night. The experts bargain over a fictional €100 million EU cheque, decide whether the EU can compete with faster offers from other powers, test how easily disinformation could exploit frustration with enlargement, and imagine what would happen if EU membership was finally put to a public vote. Along the way, Serbia proposes keeping its relationship with Brussels “casual”, Bosnia finds a creative use for €100 million, and Ukraine calls for Hungarian “Varangians” when backsliding strikes.
When a crisis hits, does speed matter more than values? Can “Europe never wanted you anyway” become a winning political message? And if a country finally joins the EU, what stops democracy from sliding backwards once the prize of membership is secured?
Further reading:
RE-ENGAGE research overview
RE-ENGAGE research on Albania
RE-ENGAGE research on Bosnia and Herzegovina
RE-ENGAGE research on Georgia
RE-ENGAGE research on Moldova
RE-ENGAGE research on Serbia
RE-ENGAGE research on Ukraine
This podcast was recorded live in Lisbon on September 3rd, 2026.
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