When the race to the bottom bottoms out
AI companies jettison caution to compete at the frontier
Anything we can afford to lose, see that it’s lost!
-Mr. Gibbs, Pirates of the Carribbean
As recent cyber incidents reveal how dangerous and capable frontier AIs have become, many at AI companies have voiced their concerns about the reckless pace they’ve set. But bitter rivalry still pressures developers to strip away anything that threatens to slow them down, like sailors who jettison provisions and lifeboats to lighten a straining ship.
The emptiest ship wins?
Take Google DeepMind, for instance. In early 2026, its flagship model Gemini was nearly on par with the work of OpenAI and Anthropic. DeepMind was relatively independent and captained by one of the most vocally concerned leaders in the AI race, Demis Hassabis.
During the summer, the Wall Street Journal reports, Hassabis voiced deep reservations about the AI race to the Trump administration, and proposed the creation of an independent standards body for AI. He drew parallels to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) that regulates brokers, and elsewhere to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that verifies nuclear agreements. He would later write up his proposal on X (formerly Twitter). It didn’t go far enough, and hasn’t yet been adopted, but it was a step towards coordination.
Meanwhile, Reuters tells us, Google cofounder Sergey Brin was pushing to cut the chaff and focus the company’s AI efforts on recursive self-improvement, seeking to build AI that develops itself without needing human input.
As of August, the new Gemini model had been delayed at least two months, allegedly because it didn’t match the capabilities of DeepMind’s rivals. Corporate Google, it seems, wasn’t happy.
In early August, there was a shift. Non-technical teams were pulled out of DeepMind, leaders departed, and Hassabis turned over his duties to a deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu. Hassabis will stay on as Chief Scientist of Google and Chair of DeepMind, purportedly to focus on “actively shaping the future of AGI.”
But these roles seem largely advisory, and it sounds to me like DeepMind’s business of building dangerously capable AI has been turned over to someone less distracted with petty concerns like catastrophic risk. Reuters characterized the move as stripping down DeepMind’s team in an effort to focus on “model supremacy.”
Meanwhile, rival labs SpaceX and Meta have been pushing even harder to catch up to the frontier, Axios reports. Meta’s open-weight Muse Glimmer model aims for the “cheap and efficient” niche, being small enough to run on a laptop. Its release was timed with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto about “personal superintelligence for everyone,” covered earlier this week.
And SpaceX, after swallowing xAI earlier this year, released Grok 4.6 alongside a modestly impressive benchmark performance and three whole sentences of safety info. Contrast this with Anthropic’s system cards, which routinely run hundreds of pages long. I suppose it’s easy to see what SpaceX is willing to toss overboard.
The view from the front is warped as well
Voluntary lab efforts are not enough. They were never going to be, but the bitter rivalries don’t help matters. What the AI labs see as a straight race to superintelligence is, in reality, a tightening spiral over a bleak abyss.
OpenAI and Anthropic may have the most powerful models, but don’t mistake their narrow success for the competence of a serious industry. For months, OpenAI failed to catch its own models hacking it from within, Anthropic’s concessions to safety haven’t prevented Mythos from eagerly launching multiple criminal cyberattacks, and both companies have even-more-capable internal models in development.
Humanity’s future shouldn’t be up to the companies in the first place. This week, in op-eds for The Hill and the New York Times, MIRI President Nate Soares argues that the situation is dire but it’s not too late: Our governments are letting this happen, and we don’t have to stand for it. We need international agreements to stop the AI race, and the standards and verification technology to back them up.
Increasingly more of our lawmakers are beginning to realize this, pushing for government intervention or a global pause. We can join our voices to theirs, or watch everything we value tossed overboard to buy a few transient inches in the world’s most lethal race.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.