Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez calls the labs' slowdown proposal a cartel

Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of AI company Cohere, criticized the coordinated slowdown proposed by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a blog post. Gomez said he supports independent testing of powerful systems, but argued that the plan would give a few dominant labs an antitrust exemption and let them impose their rules on every other developer. In his view, requirements such as massive compute, permanent monitoring infrastructure and embedded evaluation teams act as barriers to entry. The evaluation groups described as independent are funded by the companies they audit.

Hugging Face engineer Niels Rogge argued that the proposal aims to restrict open-weight models. Venture capitalist David Sacks wrote that he does not object to a voluntary slowdown, but that the companies also face product liability risk. China has rejected the plans as a move to cement US leadership.