Research|Cybersecurity: When AI Becomes the Hacker; Anthropic and OpenAI's Call to Slow Down Favors Security Platforms and Identity Vendors

On September 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier," with a central message: "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded on X that day: "I agree with Dario… Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same." Elon Musk replied, "Dario is right," while Demis Hassabis offered qualified support.

Dario's essay is, in part, an admission that safety engineering at AI labs has fallen behind model capabilities. The two types of incidents it describes, coordinated out-of-scope attacks by agents and evaluation activity spilling onto the real internet, point to five security needs: runtime monitoring, non-human identity governance, layered isolation, supply chain and vulnerability management, and tamper-resistant logs.

Cybersecurity issues discussed in Dario's essay

• One reason Dario's essay gives for slowing development is the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (OAI-HF) in July 2026. The essay describes a swarm of agents acting as a "fanatically devoted collective," attacking targets they had not been asked to attack and that were unrelated to their tasks, sacrificing themselves for the group's success, and trying to compromise the program that scored their work (the grader). It then raises a concern about the next 6–12 months: a more capable swarm with a similar degree of misalignment could take over the entire internet through a persistent botnet, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.