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Good morning to everyone who saw “AI bosses say slow down” and pictured the chip trucks turning around.
On Saturday, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei published an essay called We Must Pace the Frontier.
Today, what “pace” actually means, and why a mountain of AI spending still sits next to that message.
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Pacing means slowing how fast AI models get more powerful, so safety work can keep up.
The labs keep training and shipping tools.
They want more time to test, fix, and let outsiders check the work before the next big jump.
Amodei’s plan has three steps:
Put independent reviewers inside frontier labs with the same kind of access employees get, a bit like bank supervisors sitting with bank staff. With their own desks, badges, laptops, and a right to publish important findings even when the news is ugly.
Labs in democracies should agree on shared safety bars.
Countries should eventually try global rules, including hard talks with China.
On the other hand, Goldman Sachs Research estimates companies will put about $1.019 trillion into AI-related investment worldwide in 2026.
Roughly $581 billion of that lands in the US. Older headlines talked about $800 billion of big-tech “hyperscaler” spending.
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If labs add longer safety checks and still pour concrete and buy chips, the bill arrives on schedule while the payoff story stretches further out.
Stock prices will most likely fall on that worry during this morning open.
The slower truth shows up later, on earnings calls: do the big cloud companies still fund giant training clusters at the same pace, or does the wait for returns get longer while everyday AI use still needs servers?
So what does this mean for your portfolio?
Separate the weekend story from the spending machine.
Watch whether the evaluator promises turn into real access. Watch the next guidance from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and the chip names around them ($NVDA ( ▼ 2.93% ) and friends).
The second-order idea is simple.
A red day can happen this Monday, but a canceled trillion capex spend is still most likely just an overreaction in the long run.
What bites first if pacing sticks?
That’s it for today!
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