The AI Labs Sold 80%. Customers Got 16%. Now They Want to Slow Down.

Last weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay called We Must Pace the Frontier. His argument: AI capabilities are advancing so fast, and a recent rogue-agent incident was so alarming, that frontier labs should deliberately slow how quickly they improve their models. Within hours, Sam Altman and Elon Musk publicly agreed. Demis Hassabis and Satya Nadella followed.

All three are arguments about the CEOs. The more useful question in this Nerd Lawyer’s humble opinion is what the customers are saying. And the customers are telling a very different story.