Trump Calls Dario Amodei A Perfect Little Angel As He Calls For An AI Slow Down

Today's AI news: Dario Amodei's essay We Must Pace the Frontier lays out a three-step plan to slow AI capability gains, starting with embedded third-party evaluators with employee-level access, which Anthropic is adopting unilaterally and Sam Altman says OpenAI will match. Donald Trump responded that Amodei is pretending to be a perfect little angel and China's Global Times called it a Cold War playbook. Claude Fable solved the 370-year-old Cyphral Distich in 44 minutes. Google Labs opened Dreambeans, illustrated daily stories built from your Gmail, Calendar and Photos, to all US adults. Valve's Steam Frame VR headset went on sale from $1,059. And Figure's Brett Adcock teased a robot stepping out of a van. Chapters: 0:00 Today's AI News 0:31 Pace The Frontier 1:40 Fable Cracks The Cypher 2:28 Google Dreambeans 3:08 Steam Frame 3:50 Figure Van Teaser Blend Roundup 2026-09-14 https://x.com/DarioAmodei/status/2098773920774074715 https://x.com/sama/status/2098811563415150910 https://x.com/sama/status/2099348812305473766 https://x.com/sama/status/2099352016988614852 https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/2099504936543228046 https://x.com/Reuters/status/2099352485303386590 https://x.com/bcherny/status/2099322487603634395 https://x.com/GoogleAI/status/2099489445846126676 https://x.com/valvesoftware/status/2099544354436370685 https://x.com/Half_Life_III/status/2099498417894334902 https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2099521332824379423 Dario Amodei says the AI industry must slow down, Sam Altman agrees, and Donald Trump calls him a perfect little angel. Claude Fable cracks a cypher that stumped scholars for 370 years. Google's Dreambeans turns your Gmail and Photos into illustrated daily stories. Valve's Steam Frame goes on sale at over a thousand dollars. And Figure teases a delivery robot stepping out of a van. Here's today's AI news. Dario Amodei published a 3400-word essay on Saturday titled We Must Pace the Frontier, arguing the industry should deliberately slow capability gains so alignment, interpretability and security research can catch up. The plan has three steps. First, embed third-party evaluators like METR inside labs with permanent employee-level access, desks, badges and the contractual right to publish findings. Anthropic is doing that unilaterally now. Second, industry-wide pacing through legislation or an antitrust waiver, with capability certifications before release. Third, international agreements with China, up to and including a development pause, backed by chip export controls and action on distillation. Sam Altman said OpenAI will match the evaluator commitment and that no competitive pressure justifies recklessness. Elon Musk backed it too. Then the politics arrived: Trump said Amodei is pretending to be a perfect little angel and the only guardrail AI needs is a high-IQ president, while China's Global Times called the essay a Cold War playbook. Three labs agreeing is new. Two governments disagreeing is not. Claude Fable has solved the Cyphral Distich, a cypher Sir Thomas Urquhart embedded in a 1653 book, two lines of thirty-two numbers each that sat on Klaus Schmeh's list of the top fifty unsolved encrypted messages. It took forty-four minutes, 176,000 tokens and no human interjections. The trick wasn't brute-force cryptanalysis. Fable read the surrounding text, noticed Urquhart's emphasis on the number thirty-two and a poem pointing to the author's mind, and worked out that each number indexes a word in a matching section of the book, take the first letter. The plaintext: O God uphold King Charles the Second and make him the supreme ruler of this land. Thirty-two letters a line, rhyming, and exactly what a Royalist would hide. Google Labs has opened Dreambeans to every US account over eighteen on Android and iOS. It's an opt-in feed that pulls context from Gmail, Calendar, Search, the Gemini app and face grouping in Google Photos, then uses Personal Intelligence and Nano Banana 2 to generate a small set of illustrated daily stories about your life. It might notice a friend's birthday is coming, draw a story of the two of you and suggest a gift with a link to buy it. One daily notification, thumbs down anything that misses. Google says strict privacy filters apply. It's the most personal data Google has ever turned into content, and it's cartoons. Valve's Steam Frame goes on sale today. It's a standalone wireless VR headset with tracked controllers, running a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and sixteen gigabytes of memory. It has 2160 by 2160 resolution LCDs per eye at up to 144 hertz and inside-out tracking. The 256-gigabyte model is 1,059 dollars, the terabyte model is 1,299. Every purchase includes Half-Life: Alyx. As with the Steam Deck, it's a reservation lottery: sign up before September 17th for a shot at the first batch. The Meta Quest 3 is half the price, so the big debate will be whether the premium price tag is justified. Brett Adcock posted seven seconds of video with no caption: a humanoid robot's legs stepping down from the back of a van onto a pavement. That's the whole clip. It echoes the delivery sequence in the Figure 03 launch video from last October, which showed the robot carrying a parcel to a front door, and Figure 03 is now working shifts at BMW's Spartanburg plant. No parcel, no partner, no service announced. Adcock knows exactly what he's doing with a seven-second clip and no words. Something is coming, and it probably rings your doorbell.