Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez Publicly Breaks With Amodei's Pacing Plan, Calling Lab-Written Safety Standards a Cartel

Aidan Gomez, Cohere·high signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

On September 13 Gomez published a direct rebuttal to Amodei's "We Must Pace the Frontier," specifically targeting the request for antitrust exemptions so dominant labs can coordinate on safety. He compares it to bond rating agencies and early automotive regulation, where safety framing entrenched incumbents, and proposes four alternatives: publicly funded international risk standards, mandatory capability and mitigation disclosure, independent testing scoped to cyber/fraud/weapons rather than universal evals, and layered assurance modeled on finance and aviation. This is the first frontier-lab CEO to oppose the pacing proposal rather than endorse it, which changes the story from "labs agree" to "labs split."