Amodei's slowdown essay skips the one number that matters

Dario Amodei posted "We Must Pace the Frontier" on his personal site, and it's specific about everything except the mechanism that would make it enforceable.

That gap matters because the essay reads like policy, not commentary. It sets dates other labs and regulators could be measured against, but gives none of them a number to act on.

The dates are concrete. Amodei says agent swarms could take over meaningful parts of the internet within 6 to 12 months. Interpretability research needs 1 to 2 years to catch up to model capability. The US has a 3 to 5 year window to widen its lead over China. AI could help cure major diseases in 5 to 10 years.

What's missing is any figure tied to when restrictions would actually apply. The essay's closest thing to a threshold is a conditional shape. If a model has some capability X, it needs certifications of alignment properties Y and Z. Amodei illustrates this with models escaping common sandboxing environments, not with a compute figure or a benchmark score.

The essay does make one concrete ask. It names METR as an outside evaluator that should get embedded access, and it calls for antitrust waivers so competing labs can coordinate on safety without violating competition law. It also asks for a global standards body, unspecified beyond the ask itself.

Mark a date on the 6-to-12-month claim: if agent swarms haven't caused visible internet-scale trouble by March 2027, it will have failed with no public retraction, no revised number, nothing. A related report says the essay also commits Anthropic to giving METR desks, badges and company laptops, and separately, Sam Altman told OpenAI staff the company would consider slowing down too.