The pioneers of artificial intelligence are divided: here’s who wants to slow things down and who wants to speed them up

For almost four years, they have fuelled the most frenetic race in recent technological history. They have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, built ever more powerful data centres and launched models capable of writing, programming, reasoning and generating images in a matter of seconds. Now, however, some of the key players who have driven this revolution are calling for a pause.

From Dario Amodei of Anthropic to Sam Altman of OpenAI, via Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, a growing number of Silicon Valley leaders argue that the development of artificial intelligence is advancing too rapidly for us to understand and control its effects. This marks a significant shift in tone in a sector that, until just a few months ago, seemed dominated by the opposite mindset: to outpace the competition.

Here are the key players in this clash between those in favour of a pause and those advocating a faster pace.