Leave it to Elon Musk to say, essentially, I’ve been right all along.
The SpaceX (SPCX) and Tesla (TSLA) CEO agreed with Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) CEO Dario Amodei on his essay arguing for pacing AI advances.
The crux of Amodei’s argument is that AI using recursive self-improvement “could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.”
In order to prevent future harms, Amodei said frontier AI companies should commit to embedding third-party evaluators in their organizations that can assess their AI models and confirm the labs’ “adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes.”
Musk replied on X.com – “Dario is right,” but also added later that he’s been “sounding the alarm” over AI for some time now, linking back to a post he made back in 2023, when he wrote “AGI is significantly higher risk than nuclear weapons, in my opinion. Super smart humans have trouble imagining something vastly smarter than themselves.”
What’s interesting is Musk has put a huge bet on AI with SpaceX’s AI division, its data center buildouts, and the Grok chatbot, as well as Tesla with its “physical AI” products like robotaxis and Optimus robots, which are slated to enter production by the end of this year.
The big money so far has been with data centers.
The four big AI compute deals SpaceX has inked amount to around $45.7 billion in ARR (annual recurring revenue) for December. CFO Bret Johnsen said recently that he has “even more conviction” in hitting SpaceX’s $100 billion ARR goal by the end of the year.
Musk isn’t the only one who could stand to lose gains from the massive AI bet big tech and the frontier AI startups have made; just look to Amodei and his rival OpenAI’s (OPAI.PVT) Sam Altman, who may throttle back his own IPO ambitions.
Anthropic’s S1 IPO filing will drop any day now, and may include some language on throttling back its product roadmap and buildout, which may blunt profitability metrics (though a recent FT story suggests 80% margins backing out some costs still remain).
Altman himself has said that OpenAI will push its IPO out to 2027, allegedly to address safety concerns.
Are the moves to push back on AI development a sign that the CEOs are looking out for humanity or a cynical ploy to actually boost the values of the companies’ respective AI products, as Michael Burry suggests.
One thing is for sure. When it comes to Elon Musk — he tends to make bets that pay off — both for shareholders, but mostly for himself.
Pras Subramanian is Lead Transportation Reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on X and on Instagram.
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