Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition:

• AI’s X-risk breaks into the mainstream
• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calls for a coordinated industry safety effort
• Anthropic details attempts to misuse its AI models
• China’s top spy warns AI could pose a risk to the Communist Party
• OpenAI is violating California’s new AI safety law, watch dog group says.
• Half of companies aren’t following their own AI governance policies, E&Y survey says.

In the past few days, I’ve heard a lot of people repeating that old saw—often wrongly attributed to Vladimir Lenin—about there being “weeks when decades happen.” It certainly seemed to be one of those weeks in AI. Concern about existential risk has been a strain of AI discourse for decades. But, despite occasionally making headlines when someone like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Geoffrey Hinton would express their fears about AI posing a grave risk to the species, it never really cemented itself in the general public’s consciousness in the way, say, climate change, or the risk of nuclear war, has. If politicians debated AI regulation at all, the discussions centered around data center construction and utility bills, jobs, education, mental health, algorithmic discrimination, and civil liberties, not the risk of rogue AI killing people—maybe even all the people. Until now, that is.

The drumbeat of dire warnings from employees resigning from—or in some cases still working for—Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind, all saying that the leading AI companies are developing the technology recklessly and risking human extinction, has dominated the global news cycle for an entire week (which is really saying something in this day and age.) AI company CEOs and politicians have been stirred to respond. After years in which both domestic AI regulation and efforts at some kind of international AI governance regime had mostly stalled, suddenly the air is electric with possibility.

My Fortune colleague Nick Lichtenberg had a good story on why the resignation jeremiad of former Anthropic and OpenAI safety researcher Jacob Coxon had such impact when previous warnings, often from much higher-profile individuals, did not. The short answer is that coverage of the Hugging Face incident and other “rogue AI” episodes as well as people’s own experiences using AI agents seems to have opened the Overton window on discussing “loss of control” dangers. The timing, with Anthropic on the verge of an IPO and OpenAI edging closer to one too, also no doubt played a role.

The question now is what happens next? Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell sat down with Altman on Friday to ask him those questions for her “Fortune 500: Titans & Disruptors of Industry” vodcast (we just call it “Titans” for short.) Altman said the company was in favor of coordinating an industry-wide slowdown in the pace of AI development with bitter rivals, including Anthropic and SpaceX, as well as Google DeepMind, Meta, and perhaps others. (Altman famously doesn’t get along with either Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei or SpaceX’s Elon Musk.) He hinted that such discussions were already underway and that a coordinated slowdown might be announced soon. He also said that, if necessary, he would have no problem telling investors that OpenAI had taken actions to prioritize safety that had cost them financially—and that OpenAI’s investors were warned of this possibility going in. He also definitively said OpenAI would not go public this year, in part due to the current concerns about the safety of the latest AI models, but also, he hinted, because OpenAI’s business isn’t yet in the right place. You can check out the full vodcast episode here. It’s well worth your time to watch.

A coordinated slowdown?

After Alyson’s interview, Amodei put out a blog post also calling for a coordinated slowdown or pause among frontier labs in democratic countries. He said that in some cases, though, coordinating with other AI labs would require an antitrust exemption from the government. He also said that Anthropic would appoint independent evaluators to be permanently on-site at its offices to review its safety work. (He mentioned the nonprofit AI evaluation company METR as his preferred partner for this.) He also said that the U.S. and other democracies should try to strike some kind of international AI governance agreement with China and authoritarian states, if possible. Altman quickly came out and endorsed most of what Amodei said—in particular saying that OpenAI would also embed outside evaluators alongside its research teams—although he was careful to note that “pacing does not mean stopping.”

In the wake of Coxon’s warnings and Amodei’s call to action, a number of U.S. lawmakers introduced legislation or renewed efforts to push forward existing bills. Some, such as a bill introduced by Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, call for an outright ban on the development of “artificial superintelligence” and mandate that U.S. AI companies pause current research until safety techniques improve. Others, such as a bipartisan bill from Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, would impose a duty on AI companies to prevent catastrophic harms. There were also calls for Congressional oversight hearings on AI’s catastrophic risks. Former President Barack Obama urged Democrats to put AI governance at the center of their legislative and campaign agenda. Meanwhile, a group of 70 U.K. parliamentarians signed an open letter calling for the British government to ban the creation of artificial superintelligence and work on an international AI treaty.

Trump pushes back

But there was strong pushback from some of the politicians that matter the most. President Trump posted to his Truth Social platform that the only guardrails AI needed “is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that in spades!” He criticized Amodei by name, accusing him of “pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’” and said his administration had already stopped Anthropic from “doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things.’” He said the U.S. already had regulatory power and criminal laws that applied to AI companies and that there was “a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China.” He made similar comments in a phone call to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that Huang, with Trump’s permission, broadcast to a live audience at an “All in Podcast” summit. This was followed up by the Republican Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson, saying that fear of AI was drummed up by the media and that “we’re not going to take stupid, knee-jerk reaction prescriptions on this.” Not to be outdone, Chine