my suspicion is that all the 'dire warnings' are part of a hype cycle to boost the stock price in advance of the IPO, so that the investors can cash out fast before everyone realizes just how much of a scam their shit is.
biggest fucking pump and dump on the planet.
Soo according to Anthropic (https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement) they are thinking of slowing or halting frontier model development, but only if their competition does so as well and they have a nuclear-disarmament-style inspection process to verify this is the case.
There's two possible reads on this, of course.
The cover story is that they are worried about the models self-improving and becoming God and running away etc. Because they're vibe-coding 80% of their new stuff and model collapse is totally not a real thing.
My preferred interpretation is that training costs are getting out of hand, they are terrified of shareholders finding out how much they are spending on training when they go public, so they want to cut back but they're afraid of falling behind and losing their edge so the only way they're willing to do so is if they can be assured the competition isn't out-spending them.
There has to be an antitrust case here if somebody is willing to bring one (good luck in today's political climate but hey I can dream)