How AI extinction warnings sparked a weekend of CEO pledges and political pushback

Leading artificial intelligence executives backed calls to slow the development of advanced models over the weekend, turning warnings about human extinction into a dispute over corporate responsibility, government oversight and competition with China. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s intervention on Saturday drew support from OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis. Their unusual convergence followed public warnings from researchers that increasingly capable systems could become difficult to control. But agreement on the need for caution left the harder questions unresolved, like how much development should slow, who would enforce restrictions and whether competitors would accept the same limits. By Monday, the uncertainty had reached financial markets, with AI-linked Asian stocks falling as investors assessed the implications for...