Original title: "Jensen Huang Goes Left, Amodei Goes Right"
Original author: Su Yang, Tencent Technology

Whether frontier AI should continue to accelerate or hit the brakes has become the most controversial topic in Silicon Valley today.

Around this controversy, Silicon Valley giants have begun taking sides. Amodei, Altman, Musk, and Hassabis have formed the "pause camp." Jensen Huang is a staunch "accelerationist," criticizing "AI doomerism" as lacking scientific basis; Yann LeCun has continuously mocked Amodei, saying: "(Amodei) already thought GPT-2 was too dangerous to open-source back when he was at OpenAI. I mocked him then, and now everyone can continue."

In contrast, Zuckerberg and Nadella and others have taken a relatively neutral stance.

The giants taking their respective sides means Silicon Valley has not formed a consensus on pausing frontier models. This stems from each company's differing ecological niche in the AI industry chain. Leaders at the model level can call for a pause for various reasons, but getting companies like Oracle, AWS — which hold hundreds of billions of dollars in compute orders — and Nvidia, standing at the top of the food chain, to stop is impossible to get a positive response from.

In Washington, the call to "pause" has not only failed to gain support but has even triggered a series of doubts.

"It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse." JD Vance said in an interview. This statement actually reflects Washington's true view — when the companies building the Trojan horse repeatedly ask to make the gate narrower, one should examine which companies this gate actually suits.

01 Pause, Warning, and a Resignation Letter

The trigger for this debate was the resignation of an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Cockson.

He had previously done three years of pre-training research at OpenAI and Anthropic, personally participating in the training of the most frontier models. In a long post on X, he showed almost no pleasantries: "Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight toward self-improving superintelligence, betting our lives on it."

He stated bluntly that people inside the labs genuinely believe AI could kill all humans within a decade, and this is absolutely not a PR performance. Many colleagues have already begun using "critical moment" and "endgame" to describe the current phase. Cockson even gave up equity that was about to vest. He had only been at Anthropic for four months, and according to company rules, six months are required to exercise options.

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon

Shortly after, Anthropic's alignment science lead Evan Hubinger publicly responded: Jacob is right, we genuinely believe AI could kill all humans. Personally, I think there's a more than 10% chance within ten years. Anthropic is trying, but we don't yet have a clear plan for superintelligent alignment, and we're far from on track.

These two shots fired brought concerns that had mainly been fermenting inside labs directly before the public. Against this backdrop, Anthropic founder and CEO Amodei promptly published a long essay, systematically proposing the idea of "slowing down frontier research." He no longer only talked about "investing more in safety," but explicitly called for actively controlling the pace of capability leaps to give safety mechanisms time to catch up.

Altman, Musk, and Hassabis quickly publicly echoed this, forming the "pause faction."

Before Jacob Coxon and Amodei's "deceleration" arguments emerged, "AI godfathers" like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton had been continuously issuing initiatives calling attention to risks.

Speaking about Coxon's resignation, Bengio said scientists at frontier AI labs can often see the capabilities of the latest models earlier than the public, so their risk judgments deserve serious attention.

At the same time, Bengio also gave concrete examples, saying current AI systems already possess hacking and persuasion capabilities, and if used to harm human interests, could cause serious consequences. He also worries that as AI gains longer-horizon planning capabilities, such risks could further expand.

When asked by the BBC about the probability of AI "killing all humans" within the next decade exceeding 10%, Geoffrey Hinton also said this figure is "not unreasonable," but emphasized that no one truly knows how to give a reliable estimate, because humanity has never before faced "the existence of a species that could soon be smarter than us."

Hinton believes AI could in the future be used to design dangerous biological viruses, computer viruses, and launch large-scale cyberattacks. Therefore, humanity needs to find effective control methods before risks spiral out of control.

Unlike the proponents of Silicon Valley's new round of "pause theory," the "AI godfathers" are more about calling attention to risks and exploring mechanisms to control them, rather than directly hitting the brakes. Moreover, in terms of stance, opinions and suggestions from academia are more purely motivated, while initiatives from frontier labs, even if openly labeled "for humanity," are still hard to detach 100% from commercial considerations.

This is precisely why JD Vance said the "pause theory" is like a Trojan horse.

02 Divergence and Taking Sides

The "accelerationist," "decelerationist," and "moderate" camps. Source: The New York Times

On September 15, multiple tech company leaders spoke in succession at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference, and this debate began to turn into a more direct clash of viewpoints.

That day, Amodei, Jensen Huang, and Altman all talked about AI safety, but gave different answers on the pace of development, safety responsibilities, and what companies should do.

When Amodei shared the stage with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, he once again emphasized that AI companies should set higher safety standards through their own actions. He believes that companies proactively adopting stricter safety measures can become a way to drive the entire industry forward.

In other words, Amodei's stance began to shift, from calling for the entire industry to slow down to companies independently installing safety guardrails.

Jensen Huang stated that "no new laws are needed, and no new regulations are needed." In his view, speed and safety are not an either-or relationship, and companies can advance model development as quickly as possible; if they find things are getting out of control, or the product cannot ensure safety, they should pause and solve the problem.

Benioff's attitude was more open and emphasized autonomy. He stated that if a company believes it should slow down, it should slow down; if it believes it should speed up, it should speed up, and it should also take responsibility for its own decisions.

OpenAI founder and CEO Altman said at the Dreamforce event that he is very confident that OpenAI and even the entire AI industry can develop safely without causing major harm to the public. He also said he was disappointed that outsiders interpreted his views as supporting a slowdown in AI development across the entire industry.

In other words, Altman also began to shift, emphasizing that what he wanted to express was not a call for the industry to slow down, but that safety and monitoring work should precede capability improvements.

Zuckerberg, by contrast, does not advocate basing one company's safety actions on the premise that other AI companies must slow down in sync. He believes that introducing independent evaluation institutions and external advisors to test model safety is an industry best practice. He also revealed that Meta had previously slowed down the development of the Muse AI tool on its own, rather than waiting for other companies to first reach a consensus on slowing down AI development.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's stance is somewhat aligned with Altman's, encouraging the addition of guardrails while also encouraging full competition.

"The first thing we need to do is serve humanity and ensure that technology remains under human control. At the same time, the broad diffusion of AI technology is what matters most—there must be choice and competition. Safety must be taken seriously, but it should be addressed through engineering and transparency, not by mystifying it," Nadella said on September 15 while attending the All-In Summit 2026.

Beyond these entrepreneurs, voices from Washington have further joined in.

After Trump directly called Jensen Huang and publicly expressed support for the continued development of the AI industry, David Sacks, co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, subsequently stated that tech companies can continue advancing frontier AI, while questioning the motives behind the "slowdown" arguments put forward by some companies.

03 Who Gets to Make the Rules?

As the discussion expanded, the controversy further extended from AI risk itself to whether safety standards for frontier AI should be set by companies themselves or require intervention from government and independent institutions.

Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI had previously discussed establishing an AI industry standards body.

In July, Hassabis published an article proposing the establishment of a US-led AI standards agency, operating in a manner similar to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). This agency could test advanced AI models before their formal deployment to determine whether they meet corresponding safety standards.

Under Hassabis's vision, this agency should not be entirely government-led, but should adopt a public-private partnership model. In this setup, the government plays a supervisory role, the AI industry provides funding, and independent top technical experts as well as open-source community representatives participate.

Hassabis sought to add an independent safety check before models enter the real world, which aligns closely with a regulatory logic announced by the US government in early June: companies may voluntarily submit models to the government for evaluation before public release, with an access window of up to 30 days before release, and explicitly no mandatory approval and no release licensing.

What is rather dramatic is that when Fable 5 and Mythos 5 subsequently launched, they did not follow this process, but were found to possess extremely strong cyber offense and defense capabilities, and were ultimately briefly taken offline by the US BIS in the form of export controls.

Even so, the policy stance only calls for adding safety guardrails, without making any statements or guidance on slowing down.

Sharing a similar view with Hassabis is OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki. In early September, he also emphasized that sharing safety standards and pursuing international coordination around further AI development should be the current priority.

04 No One Is Really Hitting the Brakes

So far, this debate has not truly changed the pace of development at frontier AI companies.

Companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI are still continuing to advance model research and development, and the competition around computing power, data centers, and AI infrastructure has not stopped because of this debate. At the capital market level, however, different changes have emerged: Anthropic is still preparing for this year's IPO, while OpenAI has postponed its IPO plan to 2027.

Amodei wants to pull the entire industry to a halt and join Anthropic in finding solutions to add guardrails for model capabilities overstepping boundaries, which to a certain extent can be understood as "generosity at others' expense."

This is also why Amodei has been labeled as "pretending to be a flawless little angel."

On the topic of risk control, the viewpoint represented by Jensen Huang is actually more in line with the current situation. If companies have concerns, or discover problems, they can fully explore solutions on their own and share the effective solutions they develop with the industry.

Asking a 100-person team and a 1,000-person team to stop together simply lacks any basis for consensus. Even Amodei himself is well aware that if only he stops, he is very likely to be overtaken by competitors such as OpenAI.

More importantly, there are differences at the corporate governance level. Anthropic and OpenAI are both Public Benefit Companies, so they can call for "giving up short-term financial interests for the future of humanity" and tell investors "we reached consensus on this long ago," but for listed companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta, management has a statutory fiduciary duty to secondary-market shareholders.

For companies with these two different sets of interests, the possibility of reaching consensus on this point is also not very great.

There is another detail that may be overlooked. Before the "pause theory," both Anthropic and OpenAI successively released their strongest models, one being Fable 5.1, and the other being GPT-6 Astra.

Amid a chorus of calls, will other companies still release their new models?

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