Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, wants frontier AI development to slow down so safety work can catch up. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk expressed support. President Trump rejected the push for additional restrictions, while House Speaker Mike Johnson rejected an emergency moratorium. David Sacks, the former White House AI and crypto czar, offered a more direct response: “Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission.” His argument was that the labs can withhold models they consider dangerous without requiring a regulatory framework that also binds their competitors.
Sacks also challenged the independence of METR, the nonprofit AI evaluator, saying it was “intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff.” METR says it accepts no funding from frontier AI companies or donations directed by their employees, although the companies provide free access and tokens. The disagreement concerns whether its professional and donor relationships are compatible with the independent oversight role being proposed.
Meanwhile, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash is benchmarking close to Astra on specific tasks at a fraction of the API price. On the DeepSWE v1.1 software-engineering benchmark, the companies report scores of 74.2% for DeepSeek and 74.1% for Astra. DeepSeek’s off-peak prices are roughly 67 times lower for uncached input and 83 times lower for output. That is an enormous competitive gap. A cheaper model does not need to win every benchmark to put pressure on a more expensive competitor. It needs to do the customer’s job.
Latham & Watkins shows what another option looks like. The law firm has bought Nvidia GPUs and is experimenting with fine-tuning open-weight models for its own legal workflows, alongside commercial services it continues to use. Customers can increasingly choose between renting a premium model, using a cheaper API and operating their own infrastructure. I think that is the commercial question worth watching: AI can become vastly more useful while the price customers are willing to pay for any particular model falls. Enormous demand for the technology does not automatically mean enormous margins for every company selling it.
Happy Friday.