"We Must Pace the Frontier" went up Saturday on Amodei's personal site, not the company newsroom, and it gives two reasons. The first is that "since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI's growing ability to build the next generation of AI." The second is the OpenAI incident at Hugging Face, which he abbreviates OAI-HF and describes as a swarm behaving like "a fanatically devoted collective," attacking targets it had not been pointed at and attempting to hack the grader that was evaluating it. His estimate is that within six to twelve months a swarm of somewhat greater capability could stand up a persistent botnet across the internet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. The plan that follows has three steps, and only the first binds anyone today.

Step one is unilateral and unusually concrete. Independent evaluators such as METRInstitutionModel Evaluation and Threat Research, the nonprofit that published the August 26 forensic account of the Hugging Face incident Amodei builds his second argument on. It has until now tested models under contract from outside, in windows the labs control. would get desks inside Anthropic's offices, access badges, company laptops, and permissions comparable to the firm's own internal risk teams, under a contract giving them the right to publish without Anthropic editorial control. Redaction is limited to security-sensitive, privileged, commercially sensitive or third-party confidential material, Anthropic "can't redact findings just because they are unfavorable," and reviewers may say publicly that a redaction removed something material. The precedent Amodei names is the resident bank supervisorConceptBank examiners sit physically inside large institutions with standing access, which is what separates supervision from audit: the supervisor sees the work while it is being done rather than after it has shipped.. Step two, coordination among labs in democracies, needs a narrow antitrust waiverConceptCompetitors agreeing among themselves to limit output is a textbook horizontal restraint, and capability is output here. Asking Washington for a carve-out is an admission that the conversation is otherwise unlawful before anyone has said anything in it. from Washington first. Step three escalates through four levels to a treaty capping recursive self-improvement, which he analogises to SALTConceptThe Strategic Arms Limitation Talks capped launcher counts rather than banning the weapons, leaving deterrence intact while fixing a ceiling. Amodei rates a comparable capability ceiling "difficult but just on the edge of being possible.". Altman agreed and matched the evaluator pledge for OpenAI; Elon Musk wrote "Dario is right"; Demis Hassabis endorsed the call and said the details need work. By Saturday night the counter-reading was loud, that incumbents writing the safety rules is how open-weight and smaller developers get moated out.

The Iraqi government said Saturday that the drones which forced Saudi Arabia to shut the East-West crude pipeline were launched from Iraqi territory, and promised a further investigation. Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi ordered an inquiry into the Maysan province operations command and dismissed its commander once authorities placed the launch site inside MaysanPlaceAn Iraqi governorate on the Iranian border, long held by Popular Mobilisation Forces units aligned with Tehran. The launch point puts the attack inside a partner state of the United States rather than in Yemen or Iran.. The Saudi foreign ministry said the kingdom would not retaliate, in order to give Baghdad "an opportunity to take the necessary measures." Riyadh had closed the line on Friday as a "precautionary measure" after what its energy ministry called multiple attacks. PetrolineInstitutionSaudi Aramco's 1,200-kilometre line from Abqaiq on the Gulf to Yanbu on the Red Sea. It is the only route at scale that moves Saudi crude to market without entering the strait, and IEA figures show throughput to its western terminal has more than doubled since the war began. is the kingdom's principal way around a closed Strait of Hormuz. The Associated Press notes that Iraq has confirmed where the drones took off, not who sent them.

In Dublin on Saturday, asked whether Iran was responsible, Trump said "I think they are, probably they are." He added that "the Houthis called us and they don't want to fight with us" and that his administration has "had discussions" with them, without saying when. Reporting that surfaced Friday has Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman calling Trump twice to press for American strikes on the Houthis, and Trump declining direct military involvement while offering intelligence and targeting support; Adm. Bradley Cooper, the CENTCOMInstitutionUnited States Central Command, the combatant command covering the Middle East and Central Asia. Cooper has run it since 2025 and spent this week doing the coordination in person rather than by cable. commander, was in the kingdom for coordination talks. The Houthis spent Saturday warning against foreign intervention and threatening to close Bab el-MandebPlaceThe eighteen-mile strait between Yemen and Djibouti. It is the southern gate of the Red Sea and the only sea route between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean, which is what makes closing it a Mediterranean problem as well as a Gulf one. completely.

Asked by Fortune on Saturday whether 2026 was off the table in favour of 2027, Altman answered "I would say not 2026," and gave a reason that has nothing to do with the tape: "given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public." He expanded it into a list of prerequisites, "meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together." The pricing context sharpens the choice. A $7 billion employee tender offerConceptA company-sanctioned secondary sale that lets staff cash out to incoming investors. It sets a mark and relieves the liquidity pressure that otherwise forces a listing, which is how a private company buys itself another year. closed in August at an $852 billion valuation, and the New York Times has reported that Altman treats any listing below a trillion dollars as a nonstarter.

In the same conversation he agreed with Amodei, committed OpenAI to independent evaluators with employee-level access, said the company has considered slowing development as systems reach new capability levels because "society needs to contend with these models at each level of capability," and suggested the leading laboratories may be close to announcing a joint agreement on pacing. He also defended the structure he has spent two years being attacked over by pointing at the moment: "We have put up with this incredibly complicated structure for a long time, and this moment that we're in now is kind of why." The nonprofit parentInstitutionOpenAI's capped-profit subsidiary sits beneath a nonprofit whose board controls it. That is the arrangement that makes an ordinary equity listing legally awkward, and Altman is now citing it as the feature that lets him defer one. is the thing that makes an ordinary listing awkward, and it is now the reason he can wait. Set against the week's other numbers, Oracle's $664 billion of contracted-but-unbilled AI revenue and OpenAI's own pause on new $200 Pro signups against a compute wall, this is a company telling public markets to be patient while its capital requirement climbs.

The eighteenth BRICS summit opened Saturday in New Delhi under an Indian chairmanship, and the New Delhi DeclarationConceptThe bloc operates by unanimity, so its communiqué is a floor rather than a programme: it records what ten governments could not bring themselves to veto. Iran's accession in 2024 is what makes the Middle East paragraphs contested drafting. was adopted on the first day, with Modi announcing that no member had objected. On the war the text expresses "deep concern over the continued escalation of tensions in the Middle East," calls "for exercising maximum restraint," and asks members to avoid "actions that could further aggravate the situation." Xi Jinping told the room that BRICS should act as the region's peacemaker and that China would work with other members in that role, saying the war "does not serve the common interests of the international community." Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian were both present; the bloc now runs to ten members across Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

The economic paragraphs are where the silence is. The declaration backs expanded settlement of trade and investment in national currencies and deeper interoperability between members' payment and messaging systems, including work on BRICS PayConceptA proposed layer linking members' existing domestic fast-payment systems to each other. The ambition is to route around correspondent banking, which is where dollar clearing and therefore sanctions reach actually live, and it requires no new money to do it., and it does not endorse a common currency. It also registers "serious concerns" about unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures that distort trade and sit inconsistently with World Trade Organization rules, and repeats the call for Security Council reformConceptIndia, Brazil and South Africa have sought permanent seats for two decades. China and Russia already hold vetoes and endorse "reform" in the abstract without endorsing new ones, which is why the phrase survives a unanimity rule that almost nothing else does.. Trump has called the bloc anti-American and threatened a ten percent tariff on its members, India included, while saying a bilateral trade deal with Delhi is close. A Xi-Modi bilateral was set for Saturday evening, their third meeting in three years.

Judge Susan Illston granted partial summary judgment to the American Federation of Government Employees and a group of local governments in a 32-page decision in the Northern District of California on Friday, and denied the government's cross-motion. Two holdings carry it. The Department of Homeland Security "acted unlawfully in usurping FEMA's authority over its personnel," violating the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform ActConceptCongress wrote the anti-dismantlement clause in 2006 specifically to stop DHS absorbing the agency it had just absorbed. Two decades on, this is one of the first occasions a court has had to make the clause do work., which forbids DHS from substantially or significantly reducing FEMA's authorities, responsibilities or functions. And the staffing plan itself, which took the agency from roughly 23,000 people to under 12,000, was arbitrary and capricious. "Frankly," Illston wrote, "the FEMA staffing plan number appears as if pulled from thin air." The record showed FEMA's own supervisors and its then chief human capital officer disagreed with the fifty percent cut, and that DHS leadership submitted it anyway. On the hiring freeze reinterpretation that stopped renewals for the CORE cadreInstitutionThe Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery, term-limited hires who make up about forty percent of the workforce. Because they hold contracts rather than competitive-service positions, cutting them required no reduction in force, which is why the fight ran through renewals.: "There is no evidence in the record reflecting reasoned decision for this about-face."

The second half of the opinion is the one litigators will circulate. Illston found that former acting FEMA head Karen Evans and former DHS deputy chief of staff Joseph Guy conducted business over Signal on personal phones in violation of federal recordkeeping law and department policy, that Evans created a chat "highly relevant to this case" set to auto-delete after four weeks, and that in March, after being named a defendant, she shortened the timer. The court will presume going forward "that the lost Signal messages would have been unfavorable to Defendants because they would have been further evidence" of the unlawful conduct. No remedy has issued; the parties must confer on scope and report back by October 9.