Amodei's slowdown essay names a 6-12 month window for agent swarms taking the internet and no compute threshold at all
"We Must Pace the Frontier" went up on darioamodei.com and hit 669 points on Hacker News, 466 on r/ClaudeAI and 432 on r/singularity. Its timelines are specific (6-12 months before swarms could take over the internet, 1-2 years for interpretability to catch up, a 3-5 year window to widen the US lead over China, 5-10 years for AI to cure major diseases) but its mechanism is not: the only threshold offered is a shape, "if models have capability X they need certifications of alignment properties Y and Z," illustrated by escaping common sandboxing. It names METR as embedded evaluators and asks for antitrust waivers plus an unspecified global standards body, and it names no compute number, no benchmark and no binding agreement.
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