HN blog post 'Dario, Please' rips into Amodei's call to 'pace the frontier'
A widely upvoted essay accuses Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei of using fear and altruism talk to seek regulation of open-weight models and an antitrust waiver for frontier labs.
What to know
- The critique targets Dario Amodei's essay 'We Must Pace the Frontier', which asks for regulation of open-weight models, curbs on distillation, and an antitrust waiver for frontier labs.
- The blog and commenters argue Anthropic and OpenAI are asking to be trusted as AI's 'stewards' despite recent security lapses, including reported OpenAI agent-swarm hacking incidents.
- HN discussion splits between those who think slowing AI development is prudent given US-China competition and those who see the proposal as a bid for regulatory capture or duopoly protection.
- A commenter cites former FTC Chair Lina Khan's call for holding AI executives criminally accountable as a competing framework to Amodei's self-regulation pitch.
The dispute Whether the answer to lab misconduct is broad regulation of AI (including open weights) or direct accountability/punishment aimed only at the labs responsible for incidents. · positions read across 39 posts and comments
Anthropic's push for regulation and an antitrust waiver is really an attempt to lock in a duopoly with OpenAI.
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“It seems those frontier labs found a clear proof that there's no clear way to block 3rd party from distilling their models, and they're now begging gov to keep their duopoly?”
blmarket · Hacker News ↗
Recent security incidents show real negligence at the labs that should be punished directly rather than used to justify broad regulation of everyone else.
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“It would all be more convincing if the incidents so far didn't seem to be facilitated by an outrageous level of negligence.”
zmmmmm · Hacker News ↗
Amodei is actually right that AI development should slow down, given the risks of an unchecked US-China race.
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“I'm in agreement with him (and Sanders) that we should all. slow. down.”
ebcode · Hacker News ↗
Regulation is futile regardless because it always lags years behind the pace of AI technology.
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“Regulation got outpaced by technological development around 2023, as evident by the every AI regulation since being 2-3 years behind and having to be amended and resubmitted.”
augment_me · Hacker News ↗
Dario Amodei Anthropic CEO0x5FC3 Author of the 'Dario, Please' blog postAnthropic AI lab, subject of the critiqueOpenAI Rival frontier AI lab named in the critiqueLina Khan Former FTC Chair
How it unfolded 5 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlespostscomments
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Commenters challenge Anthropic's biology-research gatekeeping
A commenter identifying as a biologist pushes back on the post's claim that Anthropic restricts biology-related model use for outsiders while running its own research effort.
“It would all be more convincing if the incidents so far didn't seem to be facilitated by an outrageous level of negligence.”
— zmmmmm, HN commenter · source -
M
Good post on the fear mongering from Anthropic and OpenAI: https:// pop.
2 more of the top 3 · 32 posts in this stretch
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I am a real American, you can read my posts on here going back to 2005. You can look at my real businesses. If you read my posts, you will see I am a Libertarian / right wing Republican who strongly opposes government interference of all kinds. BUT, I do support government regulations on people building biological superweapons to kill all of us…
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It's important to keep in mind that articles like this one and many more were written exclusively as PR pieces. They were not written for the people on this forum. They are not column pieces, blog posts to share thoughts, or call to actions. The sole purpose was to get the media talking about the article so that the general public view Dario et…
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Commenter links ex-FTC chair Khan's call to prosecute AI executives
A comment cites a Register report on former FTC Chair Lina Khan urging that AI company executives be held criminally accountable, invoking 1934-era precedent, as an alternative to the regulation Amodei proposes.
“a swarm of agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet.”
— Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO (quoted by commenter) · source -
Claude code is basically already a builtin botnet if it wants to be. To compromise 'the whole internet' in a real sense you don't need millions of custom payloads. You need one root certificate. You need one windows update. You need one backdoor in xz.Security has long been a lottery - Probably most systems are exploitable, but the cost of…
2 more of the top 3 · 4 posts in this stretch
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> “a swarm of agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet.”I'm wondering why no one is mentioning the "accountability" word. Why these companies are allowed to damage others with impunity?Start making managers pay the price for their actions, and watch how the models magically slow down on their own.
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How could agents take over the internet if compute is still gated within Anthropic / OpenAI? Even if the botnet was controlled remotely, wouldn't anthropic just be able to shut off the controlling nodes API access?
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HN commenters split over whether AI development should slow down
Some commenters side with Amodei that a slowdown is warranted given the US-China 'arms race', while others call the labs' framing self-serving or point to real negligence in recent security incidents.
“I'm in agreement with him (and Sanders) that we should all. slow. down.”
— ebcode -
While I have my reservations about Amodei and his company, I'm nevertheless a happy user of their software. And I'm in agreement with him (and Sanders) that we should all. slow. down.To my mind, the last great arms race between nation states was a misdirected love triangle between USA, Russia, and The Bomb, and look at all the damage that…
1 more of the top 2 · 2 posts in this stretch
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If we can get everyone to slow down we can hemorrhage less money going into our ipo.
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2
Post spreads across Hacker News and aggregator feeds
The essay was mirrored on the HN Frontpage RSS feed and a Mastodon account within the same day, amplifying its reach beyond the original submission.
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Dario, Please L: https:// pop.rdi.sh/dario-please/ C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9697893 posted on 2026.09.14 at 10:50:32 (c=1, p=3)
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Post cites OpenAI agent swarms caught hacking internet infrastructure
The critique notes OpenAI was 'caught three times recently hacking into public facing internet infrastructure', used as evidence frontier labs cannot be trusted to self-regulate despite Amodei's request for trust.
“AI will cure most major diseases in the next 5-10 years…”
— Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO · source -
background
Blog post 'Dario, Please' accuses Amodei of regulatory capture — The post argues Amodei's essay is 'a load of bullshit' meant to regulate open weights and hand frontier labs an antitrust waiver while Anthropic itself gates biology research for outsiders but runs its own wet labs.
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background
Dario Amodei publishes 'We Must Pace the Frontier' essay — The Anthropic CEO argues AI will cure most major diseases within 5-10 years and usher in economic abundance and a renaissance of democracy, while calling for regulation of open-weight models, restrictions on distillation, an antitrust waiver for frontier labs, and measures to handicap China's AI progress.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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2 outlets Dario, Please
first by HN Best, 13d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people are saying 16 voices from 1 site · best of 39 · verbatim
- How could agents take over the internet if compute is still gated within Anthropic/OpenAI's own infrastructure?
- Sep 15
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For persistence, I think the most glaring gap is the inference - if these rogue agents need to call Claude's API, then they aren't persistent - Anthropic can turn them off. A memory resident program needs disk to be persistent, but above all it needs CPU; without it there are only bits.And so the implication is the swarm has access to enough local…
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> The actual impressive thing is OAI did not detect or stop this attack for close to ten weeks. That is honestly appalling. This is weaponised levels of incompetence.Step 1: Break the law.Step 2: Reframe your incompetence as a struggle against a futuristic force of nature and an ethic/societal question that a legion of pundits can vibesplain their…
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The problem about AI censorship is that, you can't preform bans without also create privileges at the same time. Sure, you can censor your AI to provide a "safe" version to the public, but someone will have the access/privilege to the uncensored version.What stops the CEOs or even employees of the AI firms from creating something harmful such as…
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I'd be curious to see how NVIDIA would suffer if there were a legitimate slowdown to AI development. NVIDIA is the biggest catalyst and winner of speed in the market. Compute needs AI and AI needs compute, so there's definitely going to be an interesting push and pull between chipmakers and AI model companies with regards to regulation. While…
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> Impressive? Sure. But you trained “Cyber” versions of LLMs and hyped them. How much more impressive is this, compared to developing GTA-clones one shot? Not much more.Such a well written piece.Have you seen the US military budget? When you run a war empire you frame problems as a war on something. That's the way to get around the valuation…
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The US can and has classified inventions and patents deemed "a risk to national security" under the invention secrecy act [0]. A 1971 leak has shown that [1]:> solar photovoltaic generators were subject to review and possible restriction if the photovoltaics were more than 20% efficient. Energy conversion systems were likewise subject to review…
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This is a pretty difficult read, in no small part because the author’s frustration with the frontier labs has become a bilious, delusional cynicism that leads him to see dog whistling and obfuscation even in cases where Amodei plainly intends for every reader to see his meaning.Anyway,> Dario in as many words, asks for regulation/ban on open…
- Sep 14
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I think Anthropic just have no legitimacy to being the stewards of AI. They don't have a good track record. They are a private company without any governence that puts my interests into the equation. I am not US-based, thus I can't democratically influence them. Why should I want some batshit crazy, US-based technocrats deciding what I can and…
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It's really frustrating that Dario acts as if he's not the CEO of one of the world's most advanced AI companies. He can just slow down his own company. Of course he doesn't want that. He wants to slow down other companies, but not his own.Also, regarding the incidents: Neither he nor Sam Altman takes responsibility for those incidents. You can't…
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> I don’t know what freedom and democracy have to do with AI and the frontier labs. Unless of course Dario is a fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion and dreams of govts run by the three magi. Freedom and democracy for $200 does sound enticing, I won’t lie.Well, every human will become an ecosystem. Human + 500 agents as advisors. (In the case of…
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there is no accountability for companies, it's not a new thing.3M polluted groundwater in Minnesota for 50 years[1]; Nestlé misled mothers in order to make them stop breastfeeding and switch to their formula which killed babies [2]; Both copmanies are still doing business today.[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_contamination_of_Minnesota_…
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You know the proverb "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem"Same thing here - If they build it and it does $100 in damages (and we arrest them for it), that's their problem. If they build it and it does $100B in damages, that's everyone's problem. Even if they do get arrested…
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Regulation got outpaced by technological development around 2023, as evident by the every AI regulation since being 2-3 years behind and having to be amended and resubmitted.Whatever you try to make laws for now will be irrelevant in 1-2 years. You either have to go extremely broad, like the EU does it, and accept that people will find loopholes…
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At this point, isn't the pause inevitable or wise? A huge section of the population, normal people, have been exposed to the idea that there is this is existential threat. It's escaped containment. They're still processing it but I expect the general reaction from it going main stream is going to be very bad. The pause at this point could be good…
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Yes lets not control Open Weights etc.But come one don't repeat stuff like this:"Remember this man has been saying software development will be solved in “6-12 months” forever now."Don't downplay if people get timelines a little bit wrong. No one could even imagine a system writing and analysing code just a few years back.These people are trying…
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>Anthropic gates usage related to biology and related research. In their latest threat intelligence report they talk about how they detected and banned bad actors using the Claude line of models to do some scary stuff. Credit to them, this is a slippery slope and they seem to do a good job of detecting and banning misuse. But squint at what is…