AI

OpenAI and Anthropic keep warning about a future they're building at breakneck speed

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
OpenAI and Anthropic have released a flurry of policy papers warning about the risks of rapid AI development. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Bloomberg/Getty Images
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The two biggest AI labs in the world keep warning us about a future they're rapidly building toward.

In the past two months, both frontier AI labs have released a flurry of policy and research papers warning of similar risks — uncontrollably fast AI development alongside government regulation that fails to keep up. This has come amid both companies releasing new AI models, including GPT-5.5 and Claude Fable 5.

In a paper released last week, Anthropic called for a coordinated "slowdown or pause" in frontier model development across countries to allow policy frameworks to catch up.

"Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures," it wrote.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei reiterated this in a blog post he published on Wednesday. He said AI is moving at a "lightning pace" while policy is "moving very slowly."

Similarly, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki wrote in a Monday blog post that there needs to be the formation of an "international organization that helps coordinate leading AI efforts to reduce catastrophic risk."

They said that this organization should slow frontier AI development down so that "societal resilience, safety, and alignment can keep pace."

These articles have been published while both labs released new AI models at breakneck speed.

On Tuesday, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, its latest and most powerful "Mythos-class" model. To be sure, this model includes a range of guardrails. If it detects requests related to topics like cybersecurity or distillation attacks, Claude will either route them to Anthropic's Opus 4.8 model or steer users toward a different prompt.

And OpenAI released its GPT-5.5 model in late April, which it called its "smartest and most intuitive" model to date. It said the model will understand what work the user is doing and can carry more of the work itself.

The companies have also been encouraging rapid adoption through free usage perks for Codex and Claude Code, the tools through which companies can build AI agents to automate workflows and increase productivity.

Anthropic and OpenAI's cautionary blog posts come before both of them make their highly-anticipated public offerings. OpenAI said on Monday that it confidentially filed its S-1, about a week after Anthropic.

Representatives for Anthropic and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

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Aditi Bharade
Aditi Bharade
Aditi is a news reporter at Business Insider’s Singapore bureau. She covers hustle culture and the future of work, focusing on how AI and technology are reshaping jobs, careers, and workplaces.She previously worked for The Straits Times, where she wrote breaking news stories for the Singapore desk. She studied communications and business at Nanyang Technological University.