Why parts of the A.I. industry want to hit the slow-down button, and what it means for corporates, workers, the markets, and the economy. (Current as of 2 p.m. ET Sunday.)

Plus — Friday’s CPI inflation data, decoded, and a preview of the Fed’s next moves with Dan North, Allianz Trade North America’s senior economist.

A.I. has become a linchpin of the economy.

Powerful narratives and massive investments around A.I. have fueled stock market gains and corporate and consumer spending despite macro shocks like tariffs and geopolitical turmoil, NYT notes. And so the spillover from any major move by an A.I. company would be huge.

If large stocks crash, portfolios take the hit, sentiment follows, and spending contracts.

Each frontier A.I. company should commit to working with external, independent evaluators with employee-like access for ongoing supervision;

In parallel with regulation, frontier A.I. companies within democratic countries ought to co-develop common safeguards; and

The U.S. and other democratic governments should attempt to coordinate on a global scale — including with China — the allowable uses of A.I., testing of models before their release, limits on self-improvement, and any real pause.

In late July, more than 1,100 employees at A.I. companies signed a petition calling for the U.S. government to help prevent A.I. from developing too quickly.

Two weeks prior, Google DeepMind’s Hassabis had called for an international watchdog to vet models before their release.

Earlier on July 1, OpenAI’s Altman had offered a U.S.-led international framework through an FT op-ed.

But Musk and others have been calling for a pause as far back as the spring of 2023 — just a few months after ChatGPT launched.

“As A.I. gets more powerful and begins to do some legitimately scary things, like hacking Hugging Face and hijacking message boards to coordinate, the warnings that AI might kill us all have grown louder, and so have the conspiracy theories about those warnings,” Big Technology reporter Alex Kantrowitz wrote on Friday.

If you don’t believe in the safety explanation, you’re not alone. Investor and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology David Sacks is one of the prominent voices in tech who have called out Amodei’s move as performative.

“Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. … You are the ones setting [the frontier]. …The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it,” Sacks wrote on X.

“The average business is not deploying A.I. at anything close to the level of sophistication that has caused the [recent security] incidents these companies are reacting to,” Melissa Swift, Anthrome Insights CEO and friend of the show, tells me.

Regulation may even be helpful to rein in some of the unintended consequences of A.I. agents, she adds.

“On the less positive side, I fear that we may over-focus on the technology and under-focus on the real problem: humans with poor understanding of second- and third-order impacts of how they design, configure, and deploy technology,” says Swift.

CEOs ultimately have to set the risk appetite for their AI explorations, Saurabh Sharma, You.com CPO, told Macro Talk earlier this year at the Norwest CEO Summit.

My own worry is for companies whose roadmaps depend on newer models being better than previous ones — and whether some products will need expensive reworks if that timeline slips.

Slowing A.I. development could slow progress of tools designed to eventually replace workers outright — such as robotics for physical jobs and agentic platforms for middle-management judgement roles.

And with current levels of regret around A.I.-driven job cuts, companies will likely keep rehiring as Ford, IBM, and others have already started to do.

Lastly, Amodei modeled his proposal on heavily regulated industries like banking — which hints at where new A.I. jobs could emerge. (As someone who worked in finance before journalism, I can speak directly to just how large compliance organizations can be.)

“AI stocks will drop 10%+ on Monday morning / Brace for impact folks / @DarioAmodei just unwound the A.I. trade with a blog post,” investor and All-In podcast host Jason Calacanis wrote on X on Saturday.

Entrepreneur Brian Krassenstein says he expects a “sharp tech selloff” Monday. “Wall Street is NOT pricing this in even remotely.”

The blog post wasn't Saturday's only bad news for the A.I. trade: Fortune released an interview with Altman the same day in which he said OpenAI's IPO won't happen this year. He’s alluded to a delay in the past, The Information has reported: The technology “may change in surprising ways, and there might be good reasons to be a private company during that time.”

Anthropic, meanwhile, appears to be pushing forward with its IPO plans and has reportedly chosen the Nasdaq for its listing, sources tell Business Insider.

President Trump rejected the slowdown calls Sunday, speaking to reporters at his Doonbeg golf course in Ireland, FT reports. "Look, we're leading China in A.I. ... and, frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins A.I., wins," he said, per the FT. He allowed that "we can put guardrails" but said "a lot of negative forces" were "bringing up things that won't happen."

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that developers, not Congress, are responsible for making A.I. safe, Politico reported. He said he'd meet with Amodei, Musk, and Altman as soon as Monday if possible.

Across the aisle, former President Barack Obama and other Democrats are working to make A.I. a priority issue for the party, per NYT.

“Dario calling it ‘pacing’ rather than ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ was brilliant,” comms expert Lulu Cheng Meservey noted. “The clean rhetorical slate resets old factions, and I think it’s partly why we’re seeing Dario, Sam, Elon all agreeing for the first time in a while.”

And after spending the better part of the past 24 hours back on X, I think this is the take that rings truest: “Nobody is a reliable narrator. Everyone has too much on the line. You’re on your own,” says Bucco Capital Bloke.