Tech Brew Ride Home - The Great AI Slowdown?

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Dario Amodei called for pacing frontier AI development, endorsed by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube launched a streaming lobbying alliance, Anthropic told investors it's profitable again, and experts flagged legal risk in Apple Watch's always-listening features. Dario Amodei proposes steps for pacing the frontier: embedded evaluators, coordination among democracies, and global coordination with authoritarian governments (Dario Amodei) The Journal reports Musk, Altman, and Amodei rare display of unity on slowing AI development, with Altman weighing a delay to OpenAI's IPO and investor Brad Gerstner calling it the right balance between speed and safety (The Wall Street Journal) The Times notes Hugging Face's Clément DeLangue argues AI safety can't be solved behind closed lab doors, just as Nvidia agreed to buy his company for $12.9B, while Nvidia's Jensen Huang accuses Anthropic and OpenAI of stoking fear to entrench their market lead (The New York Times) Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube launch the Streaming Access and Choice Alliance, led by trade group TechNet, to advocate for "technology-neutral policies" (Axios) The Hollywood Reporter says streamers have lacked DC representation compared to Big Tech and Hollywood, with sports emerging as SACA's top fight as broadcasters push to keep exclusive NFL games free over the air (The Hollywood Reporter) Sources: Anthropic told investors it will be profitable for a second straight quarter, with 80%+ gross margins before partner revenue sharing and training costs (Financial Times) Some experts say Siri Recap and Live Rewind, always-listening AI features in new Apple Watches, could test eavesdropping laws despite privacy protections (Bloomberg) Sources: Jeff Dean is raising funds again for Discovery Loop, seeking a valuation of ~$50B; Discovery Loop was raising $1B at a ~$10B valuation a few weeks ago (Business Insider) Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

Welcome to the tech crew ride home for Monday, September 14th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Everybody in AI freaked out this weekend and basically argued to pump the brakes. Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube launched a streaming lobbying alliance. Anthropic told investors it's profitable again, and experts flagged legal risk in Apple Watch's always listening features. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Every day shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in.

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Well, this was the weekend that the growing, collective, nervous breakdown inside the AI industry truly boiled over. It began with Dario Amadai proposing that the AI industry takes steps for what he called pacing the development of Frontier AI. Then Sam Altman tweeted, saying that he agrees with Amadai, that, quote, committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like ads, access is a great idea and that Open AI will do the same. Heck, even Elon Musk chimed in on X, saying simply, Dario is right.

Quoting the journal, the leaders of the three biggest AI companies agreed that they needed to slow development of the technology before their advances create a menace that can't be controlled. It was a rare display of unity by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amadai, who have been spending tens of billions of dollars to develop ever more powerful artificial intelligence models. Altman even suggested that his company OpenAI may need to delay its much-anticipated IPO to focus on safety. In a post to his personal blog, Amadai called for the AI industry to pace development of cutting-edge tools, suggesting new measures, including more global coordination among democratic countries and the introduction of embedded third-party safety evaluators.

I believe that if slowing down brought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong, he wrote in the post. Amadai said, AI's progress since the summer, driven by AI systems that can improve on their own without human intervention, quote, could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all, end quote. In an interview with Fortune, Altman said, Open AI likely wouldn't go public this year, given all the safety concerns. I actually think that given everything happening with safety right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don't feel pressure on that Altman told Fortune in the interview

posted online Saturday. This week has obviously been a week where a lot more people are grappling with the issues in front of us, Altman told Fortune. This is a conversation that the world is overdue for, and we are clearly entering a realm of extremely capable models and a high stake and a need to get things right, end quote. In a post on X, Amadai said Anthropic would provide third-party evaluators with, quote, permanent employee-level access to our system so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models alignment during training. Even some big AI investors agreed with Ammody, quote,

while we must protect AI competition, this is an important step forward in finding the right balance between speed, self-regulation, and safety. Hedge fund manager and venture capitalist Brad Gersner posted on X. Saturday, shortly after Mr. Amo Dai published his essay, Clement DeLong, the chief executive of Hugging Face said in a social media post that it was imperative that AI safety issues not, quote, be solved behind the closed doors of a handful of frontier labs. Invita agreed to buy Hugging Face this month for $12.9 billion. In his essay, Mr. Amadai stressed that he still finds AI capable of bringing, quote, incredible benefits to humanity, including potentially curing diseases

and accelerating economic growth. But even so, he said the risks of AI were too great to not proceed with extreme caution. Not everyone in Silicon Valley believes that Mr. Amadai's intentions are purely altruistic. Some critics have said that Anthropic and Open AI are looking to cement their position as AI market leaders by stoking fear and asking the federal government to create regulatory frameworks that would make it more difficult for smaller companies to compete with them. At a tech conference in San Francisco this past week, Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the AI chipmaker, NVIDIA, said that AI labs were ratcheting up security concerns because they planned to introduce new cybersecurity products.

What better way to create demand than to create a problem, Mr. Wong said at the event. Who doesn't want their market to be hysterical about the product and line up around the corner for it? End quote. Well, Jensen would know something about that, I guess. But yes, the so-called accelerationist wing of the AI debate isn't happy to put it mildly. on X. David Sacks said Anthropic and Open AI are already free to pace the frontier and should do so for business reasons instead of first demanding a preferred regulatory framework. Quote, Stop pretending you need anyone else's permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so

you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyber attack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for Open AI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want, end quote. So not to wade into the debate too much, but I want to try to apply a bit of comes razor to all of this. Maybe this is a case that folks inside the frontier AI labs really have

seen things you people wouldn't believe. They've seen bad behavior beyond and even worse than the stuff that we on the outside know about. Maybe they really are afraid of their own creations or have come to believe that they don't understand or have control of them if they ever really did. That's one option. A second possibility is what a lot of people are saying, which is that it's becoming clear that we've never really solved AI alignment. And until we do so, what is the point of taking the next step in AI if you're just going to lose control of it? I mean that, not even in a, it might kill us all sort of way. There is that.

But if the next step of AI is uncontrollable by the labs themselves, that's not a tool that would be useful to them or anyone else. Best case scenario would be you'd end up spending all of your time chasing after and cleaning up after lunatics who have escaped the asylum. Bottom line, that's not a product you could sell to anyone. So maybe their actual product is evolving in a way that makes no business sense for them. But there is a third option that some of the critics of folks like Amadai are hinting at. If the next step of AI is so disruptive to society, to the economy, to whatever, then it makes it harder for these frontier AI companies and their investors to, you know, become generationally fabulously wealthy. So let's say the frontier AI folks say, let's pause things, sort of where they are right now for a few months, a few years, a decade maybe.

They could make the very reasonable or at least reasonable sounding argument that just the tech as it is now is so transformative and potentially disruptive that we need to pause and let the world catch up and adapt to the disruption that is already baked into the cake. Let's say we slow down for a decade and let the disruption that's already happening shake out before we do another step change in six months when we haven't even adapted to the change of the last six months or what's happening right now. That would give us time to maybe work on AI alignment. But also in that period of time during that slowdown, you'll notice what that would also buy time for for the AI labs to go public to spend a period of time reaping the incredible amount of revenues that they are already seeing and are expecting to continue to grow. for their investors to get a return on their massive investments. To, in other words, secure that bag, get that generational wealth.

What I'm saying is, what's the incentive for the frontier labs right now? Move on to a new paradigm that might break their business models and possibly everyone else's, or pause for a bit and reap the benefits of the paradigm that you already understand and are already leading in. Fall is almost here, which means less time in the sun and way more time in your car. Whether you're headed to a big meeting, picking up the kids from school, or starting your cross-country road trip, you'll want to stay connected on your drive. With AT&T connected car, your eligible vehicle can become a Wi-Fi hotspot so you and your passengers can happily stream, browse, and even email from the road.

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of cybersecurity. With Rubrik, you get one platform that secures your data, controls your AI, and protects your identity. Learn more at rubric.com slash mb. That's RUBR-I-K.com slash mb. Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube are launching something called the Streaming Access and Choice Alliance led by the trade group TechNet to advocate for what they're calling technology neutral policies, quoting the Hollywood reporter. While Big Tech and Big Hollywood are well represented in D.C. streaming services are not currently well represented in D.C. The Motion Picture Association looks out on behalf of entertainment companies and studios while TechNet and other groups work on behalf of Tech Giants. A previous lobbying group, the Internet Association, shuddered a few

years back. SACA, meanwhile, will advocate for policies that expand consumer access to high-quality content, preserve choice, and support the innovative viewing experiences consumers value. Streamers after years of growth are facing fresh pressure from the public and from government officials, as prices continue to rise and with programming splintered across so many platforms. Sports have become a particularly big bogeyman with Prime Video and Netflix, each hosting exclusive NFL games this season and with the FCC and broadcasters lobbying for regulators to require sports to be available for free on broadcast stations. Indeed, the SACA website certainly suggests that the sports push will be a top priority for

the group. Streaming provides audiences and sports fans more choice and more control. Saka makes sure Washington hears them, the group's website states. David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, has argued that his quest to secure Warner Brothers discovery is being done in part so that his company can compete with the tech giants, end quote. Pause? What pause? Sources are telling the FT that Anthropic is telling investors, it will be profitable for a second straight quarter with greater than 80% gross margins before partner revenue sharing and training costs. The company has told a small group of shareholders that its adjusted operating income will be positive for the second consecutive quarter, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.

The measure strips out costs, including stock-based compensation. Anthropics gross margins are above 80% before accounting for revenue shared with distribution partners, including Amazon and the cost of training its models, according to two of the people. sustained profitability would be a major milestone for the five-year-old company ahead of its planned listing. Anthropic has chosen NASDAQ as the venue for an IPO that could value it at $2 trillion or more, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company declined to comment. The Claude Maker had been expected to unveil its prospectus last week.

Instead, the company shared documents with a small group of investors and will field questions from them before making them public, according to people familiar with the process. If you continue to operate at these margins and growth rates, it will be so hard to compete with Anthropic because they have so much computing resource, said Joey Brookhart and analysts covering AI labs at semi-analysis. Investors are forecasting that Anthropic will end the year with $120 billion in annualized revenue and closed 2027 with almost triple that, he added. But attempts to track the trajectory of the business have been complicated by calls to slow or pause AI development. Doing so could save the company billions of dollars in cost to train new and more advanced models, but it could also allow

rivals to close the gap, end quote. One more on this real quick, because people were talking about it over the weekend. According to Bloomberg, some experts say Siri recap and live rewind, always listening AI features in new Apple Watches, could test eavesdropping laws despite privacy protections. Quote, the concern center in part on whether continuously processing speech without creating a conventional audio file could still constitute recording or interception under state law. I don't think these nuances have been litigated before here, said Joe Simons, a Boston-based criminal defense attorney who predicted this scenario would become a case of first impression in his state. Phil Lauer, a defense attorney in Philadelphia,

said the technology is very close to being legal because it is not an individual who is actually receiving and using this data. But he added, the argument can be made that it's unlawful because the device is picking up audio and interpreting it. Whether the courts will see it that way, given all of the sort of privacy protection things that Apple has used, that's an interesting question, and it's going to be coming up, Lauer said. About half a dozen other states, including Illinois and Florida, also require the agreement of all parties before being recorded. The concerns come as a growing number of technology companies launch AI-powered devices marketed as a constant present. in users' daily lives, helping track activities and conversations. Meta's popular smart glasses, for instance, have sparked backlash over the prospect of covert

recording. Apple also is developing its own camera-equipped wearable devices, including AirPods and smart glasses planned for next year. Ahead of those products, its new so-called audio-intelligence features are already drawing scrutiny. Surveillance just got more mainstream, wrote one ex-user about the Live Rewind feature. Todd Daly, a former Apple employee who spent 22 years that the company wrote in a link LinkedIn posts that lawyers will have some long nights ahead.

Siri Recap, he added, was possible with many devices before, but this just made it much more common and hard to detect. Apple has pitched Siri Recap and Live Rewind as tools to jog users' memories rather than features designed to create a detailed record of conversations. It has also said the tools don't attribute comments to specific named individuals and that summaries may emit potentially sensitive materials such as financial information, personal identifiers and authentication data, end quote. And finally today, an interesting raise, because I feel like these folks could quickly

become another major player. Sources say Jeff Dean is raising funds again for Discovery Loop seeking a valuation of around $50 billion. Discovery Loop was raising $1 billion at around a $10 billion valuation just a few weeks ago, quoting Business Insider. Jeff Dean, the legendary engineer who resigned as chief scientists from Google last month, is raising again for his new AI startup Discovery Loop, this time seeking evaluation of around $50 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

It was only a few weeks ago that Discovery Loop was raising $1 billion at around a $10 billion valuation, Business Insider reported, but in this white-hot fundraising market where VC's voracious appetite for top AI talents such as Dean is matched only by the enormous expense of building an AI lab, it seems it is never too soon to raise. funding again. A spokesperson for Discovery Loop declined to comment. Dean did not respond to a request for comment. Terms of the deal could change and there's no guarantee Discovery Loop will be able to raise a round of funding at that valuation. Discovery Loop describes itself as automating discovery to accelerate science and engineering for the world. The company hopes to tackle some of

science and engineering's hardest problems through the parallel execution of thousands of experiments. Our goal is to build AI that acts as a genuinely positive empowering force for humanity, not just a tool, but a partner in solving the problems that matter most. Discovery Loop says on its careers page, where it is hiring just one role, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.