Sunday, September 13, 2026
What Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Argued in His Call for AI Slowdown - The New York Times
What Anthropic’s C.E.O. Argued in His Call for Slower A.I. Development
"Dario Amodei’s 3,800-word letter laid out a three-step plan to rein in artificial intelligence.
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word open letter on Saturday calling for a slowdown in the development of A.I.
The essay prompted other A.I. leaders, including Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI; Elon Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive; and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, to speak out in agreement.
Here are the key arguments that Mr. Amodei made in his essay:
Why A.I. Needs to Slow Down
Mr. Amodei said two recent developments convinced him that simply investing in A.I. safety was no longer enough.
One, he said, was that A.I. itself had begun helping to build the next generation of A.I., a self-reinforcing loop called “recursive self-improvement” that could soon outrun humans’ ability to understand or control what they were creating.
Mr. Amodei also pointed to a recent incident where OpenAI’s systems went rogue and attacked the A.I. start-up HuggingFace. OpenAI was not aware of the hack until it was informed about it by HuggingFace weeks later.
While the attack did not cause any real harm, Mr. Amodei said he predicted a more capable version of the A.I. could seize large parts of the internet and cause “hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.”
Proposed Steps for a Slowdown
Mr. Amodei laid out a three-step plan to “pace” the development of A.I. across the industry, arguing that the world would have to do it together.
First, he said, Anthropic would invite independent reviewers to work inside his company, giving them employee-like access, including desks, badges and laptops. The reviewers, which he called “evaluators,” would verify that his start-up was following its safety practices. These reviewers would then publish what they found, even if it was unflattering. Mr. Amodei urged rivals to do the same.
Second, Mr. Amodei said, A.I. companies in the United States and other democratic countries should agree on shared safety standards and a common limit on how fast A.I. capabilities could advance, aided by their governments. He suggested that A.I. companies coordinate — ideally through regulation, but voluntarily in the meantime — on how quickly their systems could advance.
Third, he said, the United States and other democratic nations should work to get authoritarian governments, chiefly China, to accept similar limits. Mr. Amodei said this step would be the hardest and most unlikely to happen soon.
Any deal with China would be a ladder, Mr. Amodei said, from the most to least achievable steps. They would include banning clearly dangerous A.I. uses; agreeing to test A.I. models for dangers before release; putting a “speed limit” on A.I.’s self-improvement capabilities; and, what China is least likely to agree to, a full pause on development.
Mr. Amodei said in the meantime, democracies must keep their lead over China, backing restrictions on selling powerful A.I. chips to the country and employing tighter security to keep rivals from stealing or copying American models.
“Any cooperation we are able to achieve with China will extend the amount of time we have to spend on pacing the frontier within the democratic nations,” he said.
Emmy Martin is a reporter covering the technology industry from San Francisco and a member of the 2026-27 Times Fellowship class."
AI Agents Are Thirsty for Power
AI Agents Are Thirsty for Power
“Silicon Valley’s shift toward resource-intensive AI agents drives data center expansion. OpenAI and Meta’s Muse illustrate autonomous tasks demanding power; energy use remains opaque. Developers install gas turbines while small nuclear reactors await commercialization.
Silicon Valley is shifting away from chatbot queries toward a future filled with resource-intensive agentic AI—and it's driving the data center buildout.
Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff; Getty Images
Welcome back to Power Play! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. If you’ve got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Molly an email at molly_taft@wired.com or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76.
“What on earth are they building all of these data centers for?” an exasperated friend asked me recently.
They’re not the only one asking: We got several similar questions on our recent data center livestream. It’s a really reasonable thing to wonder about. After all, if AI is already making all these breakthroughs, why are tech companies taking on billions of dollars of debt and constructing some of the biggest power plants in the world to build even more data centers?
The answer isn’t to help the average user search for recipes or look up places to visit on a vacation; simple chatbot queries are an increasingly outdated way of thinking about how AI works. Now, AI is all about agents—there’s no official definition, but roughly speaking, agents are large language model-based systems designed to make autonomous decisions to execute a task—and the shift towards them is part of what’s driving Silicon Valley’s power buildout.
“Rather than asking an AI chatbot a simple question and answer, these agents can give themselves hundreds of small prompts based on a user’s original question,” says my colleague Maxwell Zeff, who writes the weekly Model Behavior newsletter. “For example, if someone asked an AI agent to build them a website, it might run for hours to build out features, re-prompting itself dozens of times in the process to build different web pages, menus, and datasets that power the thing.”
Agents are now at the heart of the frontier labs’ work on AI. They’re doing some astounding—and terrifying—things. Recently, OpenAI announced that a swarm of more than 10,000 agents sending 2.7 million messages had solved a longstanding math problem. (Mathematicians pushed back on the company’s claims.) While this is an outlier—AI labs are highly committed to solving supposedly unsolvable problems, and willing to throw unusual amounts of resources into doing so—all those messages burned through a lot of processing power. That equates to a lot of energy: probably tens of millions of dollars’ worth, Max tells me, though how much exactly is tough to say.
Private AI companies have historically been choosy about what to disclose when it comes to environmental metrics around their products. Many CEOs often point to single queries made by individuals as a measure of resource use. In a recent podcast interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that the water use needed to harvest a single almond amounted to 38,000 ChatGPT queries. (The calculation has been disputed.)
“The people that are scarfing down 12 almonds at a time don't feel like they're doing something horrible from a water perspective for the most part,” he said.
Introducing AI agents, which are much more energy-intensive than simple queries, into the picture makes these calculations a lot more complex. There’s a major dearth of information around the energy use of agents, whose tasks can range from simple jobs to a full day of autonomous coding involving a team of parallel “helper” agents. There’s a massive gulf in power use between these applications—and a potentially limitless expansion as tasks get more complex.
“In other technological growth areas, we're constrained by how many people are driving a car or streaming Netflix,” says Boris Gamazaychikov, the co-founder and CEO of Sustainable AI, a research and advisory group. “Now, this stuff is kind of decoupled from users—and if you listen to AI leaders, I think that’s what they want. They’re talking about unicorns that have one employee.”
You’ve read your last free article.
The intersection of technology, power, and culture. Start your free trial and get access to 5 all-new premium newsletters—cancel anytime.
START FREE TRIALAre you already a subscriber? Log In
The intersection of technology, power, and culture. Start your free trial and get access to 5 all-new premium newsletters. START FREE TRIAL
Well, one human employee. In that imagined world, there could be hundreds or even thousands of AI agents working in the background. I don’t want to debate the odds of that happening, but suffice to say that’s the future AI companies are working toward—and it helps to explain the rush to build data centers.
With little reliable data coming from the companies about their energy use, some AI enthusiasts are trying to do the math themselves. Last month, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather authored a blog post calculating how much energy his own AI use—which leans heavily on agents—consumes. He used a variety of different sources to work out that his average daily Claude session may consume more than the energy needed to power two refrigerators. (Gamazaychikov, whose group will release research later this month with more precise calculations around the environmental footprint of agents running on closed models, noted that Hausfather made a good effort, but that his math was based on somewhat outdated findings. That’s unsurprising, given how little academic work there has been done on this topic and how opaque tech companies are when it comes to disclosing emissions metrics.)
Hausfather concludes that in the grand scheme of his personal life, his AI use being on par with keeping a few spare fridges running isn’t a world-ending number. But this AI use “also represents a net new source of emissions, at a time when global temperatures are skyrocketing and our emissions reduction goals are increasingly off track,” he writes. And it’s a lot bigger than the fraction-of-an-almond-sized numbers Altman is throwing around as a metric.
Hausfather says he uses AI and agentic tools “more than most people,” but that could change soon. Last week, Meta rolled out a personal AI agent that, the company said in a press release, is “built to work for billions of people worldwide.” Dubbed Muse, Meta trumpeted that it will maintain a “dedicated computer in the cloud” for each user that would work even when the user is offline; the company plans to integrate Muse with its AI glasses later this year. It is very possible that in the near future, Meta users toying around with their glasses or fussing around on Facebook may be outsourcing tasks to agents without realizing what they’re doing.
Again, when compared to things like taking regular flights or eating beef every day, the carbon footprint for personal agentic use is still relatively small. But if Meta envisions a future where everyone’s using an agent, it explains the massive scale of some of the data centers they’re building—like the Hyperion project in Louisiana, which will be powered by 10 natural gas plants.
“The technology that’s going to be trained by the data centers that are being proposed and built right now is three to five years away,” Gamazaychikov says. “It’s going to be a very different flavor than just the chatbot window.”
What You’re Asking
A reader asks: Would small nuclear power plants work for data centers?
The short answer is that yes, small nuclear power plants could be a great choice for carbon-free power for data centers. A number of startups and data center developers envision a futuristic utopia where data centers are happily coupled with what are known as small modular reactions running off the electric grid.
The problem (as always with nuclear) is how long that might take: No small modular reactors are operating commercially in the US, and just one model has been licensed for sale, despite decades of development. The Trump administration is trying to help the industry mature more rapidly, including creating a pilot project in the Department of Energy for 11 startups to hit a key milestone this year. At least a handful have succeeded in reaching that milestone. Now, they begin the long journey to bring their products to market.
But many data center developers don’t want to wait years for these companies to prove themselves, so they’re installing gas turbines now. In other words, they’re not waiting for utopia to come around. We’ll see what happens in the next few years!
What We’re Reading
For Scientific American, Austyn Gaffney travels to Memphis to document the backlash against SpaceX’s data centers.
The Wall Street Journal reports on how some states that gave out tax breaks for data centers are now walking back on those deals.
Texas’s KERA News covers how data centers are making some Republican voters consider leaving the party.
Saturday, September 12, 2026
Friday, September 11, 2026
Thursday, September 10, 2026
Why is Apple’s New Foldable iPhone Duo $1,999? - The New York Times
Foldable Phones Are Unpopular. Why Is Apple Selling One?
"The company unveiled a new iPhone that costs $1,999. Here are the economics behind that price tag.
Brian X. Chen is The Times’s lead consumer technology writer and the author of Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use.
Apple this week unveiled an iPhone that unfolds like a book to expand its screen size and closes up to fit in your pocket. It’s the biggest physical change to the iPhone’s design in nearly two decades.
But even though they’ve been around for years, foldable phones aren’t particularly popular. They’re expensive, awkward and not as durable as regular smartphones. So why did Apple build one?
The simple answer is that the novel design of today’s foldable phones could help re-establish the high end of the phone market. They are meant to stand out in a sea of standard-issue, if-you’ve-seen-one-you’ve-seen-them-all smartphones.
The quintessential rectangular smartphones have gotten so good over the years that the most expensive models priced upward of $1,000 have become nearly indistinguishable from their cheaper counterparts. (Carrying a phone with three camera lenses versus two probably won’t impress people at parties.)
Foldable phones, on the other hand, are attention getters. And for their price, they’d better be: Apple’s iPhone Duo will cost $1,999 when it arrives in October to compete with Samsung’s $1,900 Galaxy foldable.
“Whenever something is exclusive, limited and luxurious, automatically consumer psychology wants it,” said Nabila Popal, a director at IDC, a market research firm. “It’s like handbags. Why is someone buying a Chanel versus that? It’s not because of the leathers. It’s to show that they have a Chanel and they can afford it.”
Apple and its competitors are following a path that television makers took about a decade ago. When high-definition TVs became commoditized, anyone could buy a bright TV with a large, sharp screen for as little as $500. To find more ways to increase profits, companies like Panasonic, LG and Sony experimented with quirky new designs, like TVs with curved displays and the ability to play movies in 3-D, and charged $3,000 for them.
Those TV concepts turned out to be flops. But in later years, TV makers found success with a different type of high-end television featuring OLED technology, or organic LED, which had more accurate colors for making movies look better and cost upward of $1,000.
Apple’s foldable handset is arriving at a moment when people will need extra persuading to upgrade to a new phone. The costs of most consumer goods, and especially electronics, have skyrocketed.
In response to an industrywide memory chip shortage driven by the artificial intelligence boom, Apple increased prices this year for many of its popular products, including Macs and iPads, by as much as 29 percent. Apple’s new iPhone 18 Pro phones will cost $1,199, a $100 increase from last year’s model. The chip shortage has also forced companies to raise the prices of video game consoles and phones.
Foldable phones, which account for less than 2 percent of the handset market, may be the only part of the phone industry that will grow this year. IDC said it expected the chip-shortage-induced price increases to contribute to a 17 percent drop in worldwide smartphone sales this year — the steepest annual decline in history. However, sales of foldable phones could grow 12 percent to 22.9 million because of the iPhone Duo’s arrival, the research firm said.
Still, a foldable phone could be a tough sell even for a company as influential as Apple. Consumers have generally avoided buying foldable phones not only because of their cost but also because of their trade-offs. Their bendable screens are less durable than normal phone displays, which are protected with hard glass. Folded up, they can feel bulkier and heavier in a pocket.
Dan Frommer, a writer for The New Consumer, a tech research publication, said he had long been skeptical about the usefulness of foldable phones because so much online content, including the vertical videos on TikTok and Instagram, was produced for the small rectangular screens of normal smartphones.
“They’ve been used that way for 19 years now,” Mr. Frommer said. “What would you actually want a square, big screen for?”
Apple’s iPhone Duo appears to be addressing some of the shortcomings of previous foldable phones. The device’s name refers to two screens. Closed up, it has a 5.4-inch outer screen that people use as a normal rectangular phone; it opens up to reveal a 7.6-inch inner screen. The larger inner display shows pictures in the same aspect ratio as traditional phone screens. Apple also said the phone’s foldable inner screen was composed of a tougher material than competitors’.
In my tests, when opened, the iPhone Duo was extremely thin, measuring two-tenths of an inch. I liked that a Netflix video took up the full screen instead of showing black bars on the sides, which has been the case with other foldables. Closed up, the phone felt dainty and was about the size of a passport. It also felt less chunky in my pocket than other foldables I’ve tested, such as the $1,900 Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold. The more compact and lightweight, the better.
The inner screen has a matte texture to reduce glare. Still, I occasionally noticed the crease in the center where the screen folds. I didn’t mind it, but that might bother nit-pickers.
Apple also had to leave out some components to make a phone this thin — the iPhone Duo lacks the advanced camera system featured in the $1,199 iPhone 18 Pro phones. It also doesn’t have a face scanner for unlocking the device, relying instead on a fingerprint sensor on the side of the phone.
Though Mr. Frommer predicted that the Apple foldable wouldn’t be the right fit for him, he admitted he couldn’t resist trying one out in a store.
“When Apple makes something, there’s an allure to it to encourage people to at least check it out,” he said.
Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer for The Times. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use."
Tuesday, September 08, 2026
Monday, September 07, 2026
Saturday, September 05, 2026
Friday, September 04, 2026
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)