The AI Slowdown Debate | Diet TBPN

“I was in the hospital because I got rhabdo. It’s brutal, but I’m recovering.” That’s how one of the hosts of TBPN opened a recent episode, fresh off an IV and still processing a chaotic weekend in AI policy. The real drama wasn’t in the hospital bed, though—it was in the cascade of statements, essays, and political reactions that erupted around a single idea: that the leading AI labs should deliberately slow the pace of frontier model development. Over the course of the episode, the hosts unpacked the timeline, the proposals, the criticisms, and the tangled incentives behind what is now being called the “pace the frontier” movement.

The Weekend That Changed the AI Debate

The episode traces the public emergence of the pacing idea back to July 28, 2023, when employees and leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Meta, and others signed an open letter calling for “pacing the frontier.” That same day, Sam Altman told Axios that OpenAI had shaped the letter’s language and had discussed pacing with White House officials. On August 18, OpenAI published a paper titled Pacing Model Development in an Era of Cyber Critical Capabilities, revealing it had already slowed scaling and paused a major reinforcement learning run—a two-week training pause that took effect on August 31. Then, on Saturday morning, September 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped an essay called *We Must