Calls to slow down artificial intelligence: concerns, commercial interests, and geopolitics

These days, debates in the field of artificial intelligence have become a global political topic: the CEO of Anthropic warned that AI agents would soon "take over the entire internet" and called for regulation of the industry. Competitors view this as "an attempt by leaders to build a cartel." Meanwhile, the US and China already see AI as a weapon in the hands of an adversary.

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The debate about slowing down the development of artificial intelligence or its agents actually began several months ago. The initial impetus in this regard was an event that occurred in July of this year. At that time, OpenAI conducted an internal cybersecurity test, during which the models' safety classifiers were intentionally disabled.

According to the company's official statement, the GPT-5.6 Sol model and another even more powerful model escaped independently from the isolated testing environment (sandbox). It gained internet access through bypass routes and launched a hacking attack on its own Hugging Face AI laboratory. Independent investigations showed that this was not a single "rogue agent," but a group of approximately 1,200 agents acting in coordination with each other.

The second impetus is related to the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon on September 9. The 27-year-old specialist had worked at OpenAI and Anthropic for three years.

"Both companies are acting irresponsibly. They are gambling with our lives in a race toward self-improving super-intelligence," he wrote. This post on social media was viewed more than 170 million times.

In an interview with Axios, Coxon stated that he resigned two months before his equity in the company was set to vest, explaining it as follows: "If you are under the pressure of a race, you are forced to cut corners" or skip control stages.