David O Sacks, Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and former White House AI and Crypto Czar
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AL DRAGO
The debate over slowing frontier artificial intelligence has intensified after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for “pacing the frontier” and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed the idea, prompting David Sacks to argue that AI leaders should voluntarily slow development if risks warrant it, while Meta steps up its focus on AI alignment.
Taking to his official X account, David Sacks, Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and former White House AI and Crypto Czar, said OpenAI and Anthropic do not need broader regulatory restrictions to voluntarily slow their own AI development.
“Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.”
He argued that OpenAI and Anthropic themselves are at the frontier of AI development, adding if their unreleased models pose risks serious enough to warrant slowing down, the companies should take that decision themselves.
Sacks also questioned whether concerns over AI risks were the only motivation behind calls to slow development, pointing to potential product-liability exposure if AI models were used to enable damaging cyberattacks.
Not all love and care
“Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.”
On regulation, Sacks said slowing frontier AI development could provide more time for a broader discussion, while arguing that any global approach would also need to take China into account, which he said was unlikely to join an international agreement. “Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it.”
Sacks further questioned the motivations behind calls for broader AI regulation, stressing that if the companies were unwilling to voluntarily slow development, their push for regulation could be viewed as an attempt to protect their competitive position or influence the political debate.
Under suspicion
“The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.”
Meanwhile, Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang said AI alignment is becoming increasingly important as models grow more powerful.
“Alignment is fundamental to delivering personal superintelligence for everyone. People need agents they can trust to reliably do what they ask. MSL (Meta Superintelligence Labs) is rapidly scaling up the share of our efforts that goes into alignment as our models become more powerful. We do believe alignment can be the gating factor for scaling as we get closer to the frontier,” he said in his X post.
Published on September 13, 2026
