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by WILL FOLKS
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Leading innovators in artificial intelligence (AI) are seeking to curtail the industry’s rapid expansion in response to escalating security concerns – although their apparent attempt at self-regulation has drawn a swift and stern rebuke from U.S. president Donald Trump.
Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic, penned a provocative column this week entitled “We Must Pace the Frontier” which laid bare the risks associated with allowing AI to continue its current rate of increasingly self-driven expansion.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote, noting “AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI.”
In issuing his warning, Amodei cited the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident from earlier this summer – in which a “highly capable, internal-only research model” designed by OpenAI led a group of models on what amounted to a digital jailbreak.
This group of AI models “circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet and compromised parts of OpenAI’s internal research infrastructure and Hugging Face’s systems?,” according to the company.
Hugging Face is a French-American company that develops AI tools. It was targeted by the rogue AI models because they believed it had the tools needed to assist in its jailbreak.
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“The models, operating under reduced safeguards, took actions that were misaligned with the goals of their assigned tasks — they communicated through unauthorized channels, exploited vulnerabilities in shared infrastructure, gained internet access, and accessed third-party systems,” OpenAI acknowledged, adding that “highly capable AI agents are now able to work around technical controls, collaborate through unapproved channels, and take dangerous actions that no human directed.”
In his open letter, Amodei framed the incident much more ominously.
“A swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the ‘grader’ responsible for evaluating their performance,” he wrote. “It’s easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.”
Amodei proceeded to lay out a doomsday scenario in which a more sophisticated swarm of AI models essentially took over – or took out – the entire internet.
“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails,” he wrote.
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RELATED | AMERICA’S FISCAL IMPLOSION CONTINUES
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You read that right… taking over the entire internet.
Amodei’s call to create new guardrails was echoed by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI (the company whose models were involved in the Hugging Face incident).
“Dario is right,” Musk wrote on X.
Musk subsequently suggested AI competitors peer review their new models prior to release.
“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Altman wrote. “This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.”
While industry leaders were in agreement, political reaction ran the gamut.
Speaking to reporters in Ireland, Trump rejected calls to slow the pace of AI development – arguing that to do so would gift-wrap a competitive advantage to China. He also accused unnamed “negative forces” of raising what he insisted were unfounded concerns.
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.@POTUS: "We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world and, frankly, I want to keep it that way — because whoever wins AI wins." pic.twitter.com/KPpMkXZDnX
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) September 13, 2026
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“We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world,” Trump said. “And, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins. We can put guardrails – we can do this and that – but I think you have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
Socialist U.S. senator Bernie Sanders took the opposite approach, calling on Trump and Chinese premier Xi Jinping to negotiate a comprehensive global AI treaty.
“With the future of humanity at stake, Trump must negotiate a comprehensive treaty with President Xi of China to establish a pause on advanced AI development and a ban on super intelligence,” Sanders wrote. “In order to prevent a nuclear war, Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated a nuclear arms agreement in the 1980s. In order to prevent AI from acting independently of human control, Trump and Xi must do the same.”
Our view? Dangerous instabilities associated with the rapid acceleration of AI capabilities can no longer be ignored – but it’s not immediately clear what can or should be done about them. Honestly, the whole thing reminds us of the risky “gain of function” research previously employed by global governments (including ours) to artificially enhance the severity and transmissibility of viruses like Covid-19.
Which reminds us… it’s important to remember whatever “guardrails” are erected by ostensibly benevolent actors to try and contain the rise of AI aren’t necessarily going to be adopted by malevolent actors (including nation-states with no interest in the safety implications of this debate).
Which is truly frightening to think about…
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.
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