David Sacks has publicly criticized OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for their recent advocacy to slow down artificial intelligence (AI) development. Sacks, a billionaire tech investor, dismissed their calls for external regulations, urging them to ‘cut the theater.’ He challenged both leaders to voluntarily halt their experimental AI projects if they genuinely believe these technologies pose an existential risk.
Sacks argued that as OpenAI and Anthropic hold an effective duopoly over leading-edge machine learning, dominating customer market share, computational breakthroughs, and revenue gains, they already control the industry’s velocity. Both leaders regularly argue that their technological advantages are expanding through recursive self-improvement. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.