Episode #25: Armen Rostamian's Foundations — The AI Slowdown

Thanks for joining us today. We're recording this while the story is still moving, which is unusual for us and part of why I wanted to do it now rather than in a month.And I’m so glad to have with me today a friend of the pod, technologist Armen Rostamian. So, what happened?On September 12, 2026, Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, the company that makes Claude — published an essay called "We Must Pace the Frontier." His core sentence: we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.He is careful about what he means. Pacing is not pausing. It is not halting training. It means making sure that the work of aligning and safeguarding these systems has time to keep up with how capable they're becoming — and that outside parties can actually verify that it's happening.