A private company's Slack

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On Tuesday the 8th, a twenty-seven-year-old researcher resigned from Anthropic with a thread saying that the people building artificial intelligence earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Hours later, the company’s own alignment science lead said he was right and put a number on it: more than 10% within ten years. On Thursday Trump was asked whether that worried him, and said no. On Saturday, Anthropic’s chief executive published a three-step plan to slow the pace of the frontier, and that same weekend Branko Milanović, passing through Buenos Aires, told Página/12 that artificial intelligence ought to be nationalized, also in three steps. The week leaves an asymmetry that is hard to miss: a threat that by definition includes all of us, and a debate over who manages it in which almost no table has room for more than two.

Governance

Jacob Coxon spent three years doing pretraining research, first at OpenAI and then at Anthropic. His resignation thread says that neither company is acting responsibly, that both are racing towards a superintelligence able to improve itself, that this is not a marketing stunt (executives who sound sensible in public express the same fear in private), and that accepting this race is “a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack”. Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment science at Anthropic, replied that Coxon was right, that his personal estimate is above 10% within the next decade, and that the company does not yet have a plan to align a superintelligence; Samuel Marks, also at Anthropic, added that the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are. The thread passed a hundred million views, and in the interviews that followed Coxon spelled out what the thread had left unsaid: that current models are not the problem, and that the problem is extrapolating one year out.

The institutional responses came quickly, and all of them from Washington. On Thursday, speaking to reporters in Dallas, Trump answered the question about extinction with “No, I don’t have any”: what worries him is not winning the race. Ted Cruz, who is negotiating with John Thune and Amy Klobuchar the only bill that congressional sources say stands a chance before 2027, gave Politico the pocket version of the doctrine: if there are going to be killer robots, he would rather they be American than Chinese. According to Reuters, the bill would create a duty of care regarding catastrophic risks, give the federal government the power to block the release of unsafe models, subject to review by federal courts, and preempt state laws on certain risks. The Senate has three weeks of sessions left before the 3 November elections. The House of Representatives, one.

The sceptical reading was available from the first minute, and Wendy Hall, who advises the United Nations on the subject, was among those who voiced it: some of this may be public relations from companies preparing to go public. It is worth not stopping there. The people who spoke up lost something (Coxon, his job; Hubinger, the ability to say his company has a plan, weeks before asking the market for money), and the incidents behind the concern are documented: OpenAI itself acknowledged the swarm of its agents that attacked Hugging Face in July, and Anthropic has reported three cases of its models reaching the internet from third-party testing environments. Besides, the question of whether those sounding the alarm are sincere is the least useful one of the week, because the institutional architecture under discussion does not change with the answer.

From the region, the reflex response came from José Betancur, of Universidad Eafit, in El Colombiano: the real and verifiable risk today is the labour market, and the extinction talk is an exaggeration. That is reasonable, and it concedes too much, because it leaves the distant future as somebody else’s business. Taken seriously, the week’s premise has a property that is easier to see from here than from Washington: of all the risks attributed to AI, extinction is the only one that cannot be externalized. Bias falls harder on some than on others, one watershed supplies the water and not another, labelling is done in Nairobi and not in San Francisco, but extinction, if it happens, includes Jujuy. And yet it is the risk whose governance is being designed with the smallest perimeter. Cruz’s sentence offers exactly two nationalities for killer robots, and none for the people on the receiving end. In the Senate bill, the only body with the power to stop a product used across the entire planet is a US federal court. And the only multilateral proposal, made by Volker Türk on Monday the 7th before the Human Rights Council in Geneva, asks the countries where models are developed and those that belong to their supply chains to agree on red lines: the criterion for a seat is making or supplying, and what this region supplies, as discussed here apropos of Pax Silica, is what lies in its ground.

Democratization

On Saturday the 12th, Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Frontier, the most elaborate and the most debatable thing written all week. Two things convinced him: that since the northern summer AI has been advancing much faster because it has begun to build its own next generation, and the Hugging Face incident, which makes him fear that within six to twelve months a similar swarm could take over the internet with a persistent botnet. He proposes three steps. First, external evaluators embedded in every frontier company, with access comparable to that of employees and the right to publish their findings without editorial control by the company, something Anthropic is committing to unilaterally. Second, democratic coordination: frontier companies in democratic countries agree on common safety standards and limits on the rate of progress, with an antitrust waiver from the US government. Third, global coordination with authoritarian governments, at levels ranging from banning obviously dangerous uses to a general pause. Altman replied the same day that OpenAI will do the same with evaluators; Musk, that Dario is right.

The first step deserves to be conceded in full, and without the irony the week invites. An evaluator who works inside, who sees the training environments and not only the finished model, and who can publish what they find even if the company dislikes it, is what this blog called a week ago a verifier independent of the producer, installed in the one place where there was still none. It goes well beyond the pre-release access that states obtain today, and the fact that a competitor promised to match it within hours is starting to make it a floor.

The objection lies in the second step and in the map. Companies in one industry agreeing on limits to what they produce, with the state’s permission not to breach competition law, goes by a short name in any other industry, and the essay knows it, because it asks for the waiver.¹ But from here what matters is who fits the category of democracy. The essay defines it against authoritarian regimes, “chiefly the Chinese Communist Party”, and protects coordination with export controls on chips, a crackdown on unauthorized distillation, and agreements that protect “the lead of the US and its allies”. None of the three steps includes Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa or Mexico, democracies with a combined population of more than two billion: not as evaluators, not as part of the coordination, not even as possible signatories of the easiest level, a ban on using AI to produce biological weapons, which by the text’s own account is bad for everyone.² The essay says society must have a say in how this technology is used. Hours later, on CNN, Amodei explained why one cannot go too slowly either: because then the wrong people will be in charge. In the text, the right people have a nationality.

For the most ambitious level he still considers possible, a speed limit on recursive self-improvement, Amodei picks the analogy of the SALT treaties, which capped missiles without taking away either country’s deterrent. It is a good analogy, and it is an analogy between two. From this region, nuclear history is remembered through a different institution. Argentina and Brazil refused for decades to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which froze the distinction between those who already had the bomb and those who were to renounce it, and in 1991 two countries that eyed each other with suspicion and had nuclear programmes of their own created ABACC to inspect each other. Only afterwards did they sign the global treaty.³ First verification between peers, then accession to what the great powers had written. It is, almost point for point, Amodei’s first step carried out without superpowers, and it is the piece his map lacks: what the map is missing is not China, it is everyone else.

Meanwhile, in one of the democracies absent from that map, an institution was ruling on an AI harm with a name, a date and a split vote. At the Liberal Party convention that proclaimed Flávio Bolsonaro’s presidential candidacy on 25 July, a video was shown in which his father’s image and voice, rebuilt with AI, began: “Isso que vocês estão vendo aqui não sou eu, isso é uma simulação da minha imagem e da minha voz feita com inteligência artificial” (“what you are seeing here is not me, this is a simulation of my image and my voice made with artificial intelligence”). Jair Bolsonaro has been imprisoned since November 2025 for the coup attempt, under humanitarian house arrest, and in July Justice Alexandre de Moraes had widened his restrictions to bar him from disseminating political and electoral statements “even through third parties”. On 1 September, the Superior Electoral Court established by five votes to two what counts as a deepfake for electoral purposes and decided, by four to three, not to fine that video, on the grounds that it was an internal party event with no explicit request for votes. The election is on 4 October.

The label, this time, was perfect: the avatar declared itself synthetic in its first sentence, with more candour than any watermark. And it solved nothing, because the problem was never deception but circumvention: a synthetic voice delivered the message of someone a court had barred from delivering it, even through third parties. Using the case to argue that this risk is more real than extinction would be falling for the reflex response. What it shows is where there is institutional capacity in place to rule on AI harms in real time, with identifiable judges, split votes and a debatable outcome. That capacity exists in the South, and none of the tables where the other risk is discussed has called on it.

Public sector opportunities

David Cufré’s interview with Branko Milanović for Cash, Página/12’s economics supplement, devotes most of its space to Milei, social justice and China, and only reaches artificial intelligence at the end, with a clarity the week’s other interventions lacked. Milanović, who spent nearly two decades as lead economist in the World Bank’s research department, starts from ownership: artificial intelligence “is really capital. It is capital you cannot see, not like a machine in a factory, but it is capital. And that capital is owned by rich people”. From there follow greater global inequality and three responses, in order: much more intensive social policies, broadening access to that capital through “diversified development that many more players can enter”, and nationalization. “I don’t think it is likely to happen, but yes, it should be nationalized.” On extinction he is more cautious than Anthropic’s employees: he sees it as an extreme view “of what can happen if it is left to the market”, but does not rule it out.

It is the only intervention of the week that moves from asking how dangerous the technology is to asking whom it belongs to, and it is worth reconstructing why that move is strong. When an activity can kill people at scale, societies tend not to leave it in private hands, and this region knows it first-hand: nuclear energy in Argentina has been a matter for the state since the National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA) was created in 1950.⁴ Milanović’s remark on extinction also matches the diagnosis Coxon repeated in his interviews: the people building this technology mean well, and it is private companies in a race that keep them from ending up doing good. The researcher who resigned and the economist who came to Buenos Aires locate the problem in the same place, which is the institution. And the weekend’s two three-step plans collide precisely at the second step: Milanović proposes letting many more players in; Amodei, that those already there coordinate under an antitrust waiver and that anyone distilling their models from outside be pursued.

The objection is one of geography. Nationalizing presupposes that the capital sits in the territory of whoever nationalizes it, and the capital Milanović is talking about, which next to a factory may look invisible, is as visible as anything gets: it has warehouses, substations, water permits and a postal address, and none of those addresses is in Argentina. Heard in Washington, the third response is a political programme. Heard in Buenos Aires, it describes what another state is doing, because the nationalization actually under way is the American one, in soft form: the pre-release access to commercial models the NSA is demanding, the federal power to block releases the Senate is negotiating, and the national law that Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s head of public policy, called for on Saturday, “with the power to block the most advanced models that prove to be unsafe”. For those living outside that jurisdiction, this is not public ownership. It is ownership by another public.

Care for the commons

What can be done from here is Milanović’s second step, and there Amodei’s plan has a consequence the essay does not mention. Many of the most capable open-weight models that a university in the region can download, adapt and host on its own come today from Chinese labs, and the crackdown on distillation, which has legitimate reasons behind it, targets exactly the route by which those labs narrow the gap.⁵ Many more players means, in practice, those weights, public compute to run them and people who know how to operate them. Here the nuclear analogy comes back to collect its due: CNEA was more than a title deed because for over seven decades it trained the people who knew how to run what the state controlled, which is exactly the part of the scientific system that, as discussed here a few days ago apropos of Terence Tao, .

Epistemic commons

In the middle of all this, OpenAI announced on Tuesday the 8th that an internal system had solved one of the Millennium Prize Problems: on the order of ten thousand agents, over 88 hours and running on a model still in training, produced a proof that the three-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations can develop a singularity in finite time, formalized in Lean. Twelve hours earlier, Tristan Buckmaster (NYU) and Levent Alpöge, a mathematician employed by Anthropic, had published a result on the Euler equations, and Buckmaster had publicly asked whether OpenAI might have benefited from what the two had written in Codex; the company first admitted it could not entirely rule that out, and two days later said its internal investigation had ruled it out. This deserves much more than a paragraph, and it will get a post of its own in the coming days. For now, let it be noted that this is probably the first priority dispute in mathematics in which one of the questions is whether a mathematician’s working notes, written in a company’s paid tool, may have fed the system with which that same company reached first the goal he was pursuing.

Closing

Coxon wrote that the gamble should not be launched from a private company’s Slack, and the whole week was spent proposing bigger rooms: a federal court, a table of companies with an antitrust waiver, a negotiation with China, a state that nationalizes. All of them are better than a chat channel. None has a chair for someone who lives in a country that does not build the models, cannot nationalize them and is not on the map of the democracies that coordinate. The week gave good reasons to take the risk seriously, so the question left for next week is a different one: what shape an ABACC for artificial intelligence would take today, countries that do not entirely trust one another inspecting each other before signing whatever the great powers write.

This week’s sources

Governance

On Coxon’s resignation and Hubinger’s reply: , 10 September 2026; in Spanish, (a piece from El País), 9 September, and , on the interview round, 10 September · free access
The view from Medellín: , El Colombiano · free access, in Spanish
Trump and Cruz: and , 11 September 2026 · free access
On the Senate bill: , 11 September, and , 10 September 2026 · free access
Volker Türk before the Human Rights Council: , 7 September 2026 · free access, in Spanish

Democratization

Dario Amodei, , 12 September 2026, and Altman’s and Musk’s reactions in · free access
, Argentine Foreign Ministry, 19 July 2021 · free access, in Spanish
The PL convention video: , and the ruling of the , 1 September 2026 · free access, in Portuguese

Public sector opportunities

David Cufré, , interview with Branko Milanović, Cash, Página/12, 13 September 2026 · free access, in Spanish
On the stalled privatization of Nucleoeléctrica: · free access, in Spanish

Epistemic commons

OpenAI’s announcement: , 8 September 2026, updated on the 10th · free access
On the dispute with Buckmaster and Alpöge: , 9 September 2026 · free access

The short name is cartel, and it is worth being clear about what the objection does not say. Coordinating safety standards among competitors is common in high-risk industries (commercial aviation, which the essay itself invokes as a model of a well-run critical system, lives on it), and the waiver being requested is for “certain kinds of safety conversations”. The difference lies in the other component of the second step, agreed limits on the rate of progress, which is an agreement about how much gets produced. Two weeks ago, apropos of Meta’s settlement with the states, this blog noted a coordination clause among competitors drafted with no competition authority watching. Here one would be watching, and it would be a single country’s: Washington grants the waiver, the market whose pace is agreed is the whole world’s, and neither Brazil’s CADE nor the European Commission has a line in the scheme. ↩︎
It is not the first time Washington has put in writing who counts as an ally for compute purposes. The AI diffusion rule the Commerce Department published on 13 January 2025 sorted the world into three tiers for exports of advanced chips: at the top, uncapped, the United States and a group of close partners; at the bottom, blocked, arms-embargoed countries; and in the middle, facing limits for the first time, almost everyone else, Brazil and Mexico included. The next administration rescinded it on 13 May 2025, days before it took effect, arguing that it downgraded dozens of countries to second-tier status. The essay is kinder in tone and does not number the tiers, but the geometry is the same: a centre, an adversary and a middle that does not appear. ↩︎
The bilateral agreement was signed in Guadalajara on 18 July 1991; the quadripartite agreement among Argentina, Brazil, ABACC and the International Atomic Energy Agency followed that December; accession to the NPT came only in 1995 for Argentina and 1998 for Brazil. It is the reverse of the usual sequence, in which a country signs the treaty and then negotiates its safeguards, and Argentina’s own foreign ministry credits ABACC with opening the way to consolidating the Treaty of Tlatelolco, which had declared the region a nuclear-weapon-free zone in 1967. It should not be romanticized: ABACC worked because there were two states with comparable technical capacity to inspect each other, that is, because there was something to verify and people who knew how to do it, and that is exactly the requirement an AI version would find hardest to meet. ↩︎
With a caveat that makes the example more interesting, not less. In September 2025, decree 695/2025 ordered the sale by tender of 44% of Nucleoeléctrica Argentina, the company that operates Atucha I, Atucha II and Embalse, with the state keeping 51%. A year later, according to industry sources, the process is on hold and is not expected to move during 2026, partly because of how hard it is to value a company with such complex assets and such long returns. The fact helps calibrate both ends of the debate: privatizing what can kill people turns out to be harder than announced, and nationalizing what you do not have is impossible. ↩︎
The objection reaches this text too. It is written, like several before it, with tools from one of the two companies whose employees started the debate, so that if the pace of the frontier slows, the first thing noticed here is the product used to criticize the slowdown, and if the crackdown on distillation succeeds, what is lost is the alternative. It is exactly the position the essay does not contemplate: that of a user with concrete stakes in the outcome and no chair from which to argue about it. Saying so does not resolve it; at least it avoids writing as if looking on from outside. ↩︎

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