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The Builders with Walter Isaacson · 3 min · Oct 20, 2026

Musk proposes rivals review AI models before release

Elon Musk says he met Anthropic staff before providing compute, then suggests weekly safety calls and rival testing of unreleased models. He argues peer review could catch dangerous capabilities while regulation moves slowly.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk is an entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX.

About this segment

Elon Musk says he met Anthropic staff before providing compute, then suggests weekly safety calls and rival testing of unreleased models. He argues peer review could catch dangerous capabilities while regulation moves slowly.

From “Elon Musk: The End of Work, the Death of Money, and a World Run by AI”, Oct 20, 2026. Watch the full episode

“I think competitors would keep each other honest in that situation.”
Elon Muskat 9:42 · The Builders with Walter Isaacson9:42

Takeaways

  1. He says the Anthropic staff he met seemed conscientious.
  2. He proposes weekly safety calls among competing AI labs.
  3. Rivals could test unreleased models for dangerous capabilities.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 10:18Musk says he stayed in government too long5:22
  2. 15:34Robots could make intelligence far more economically valuable4:30

  3. 7:33Musk proposes rivals review AI models before release3:02

Up next · MoonshotsPower shortages will constrain AI more than chips8:26

Transcript

From the transcript The Builders with Walter Isaacson publishes with the episode.

  1. 7:45

    And you've been talking to Dario Amodei. I was wondering if that could even lead to more of a partnership of XAI, Anthropic.

  2. 7:55

    Well, I guess we are providing them with the compute, which they really needed. But before I ran them compute, I went and met with a bunch of people at Anthropic to sort of, I don't know, see if anyone set off my evil detector or anything like that. Not that my evil detector is perfect, of course, but, you know, might as well just try, you know. And everyone I met at Anthropic was very nice and conscientious. So I didn't meet anyone who seemed happy shady or deceptive or anything. Um, I'm a little worried about the name because of the, you know, reality being kind of an irony maximizer that if you'd call something anthropic, uh, good chances, misanthropic, you know, um, just like opening eyes now closed stability, AI is unstable. Uh, mid journey is not mid. Uh, it seems like they're all kind of the opposite of their name.

  3. 9:15

    It's just pretty difficult to create guardrails, especially the government. I can't imagine how Congress or whatever could do it. Could you imagine the five frontier models, yours and the others, just getting together once a week and saying, all right, how are we going to save humanity from ourselves?

  4. 9:33

    No, in fact, I've recommended that we do that exact thing. When I said like, guys, what if we just have a call once a week, just like you're saying, and say, and, uh, and that maybe we, uh, a week before we release a model, we give that, you know, we give access to our competitors to say, Hey guys, why don't you try out the new model? See if you see any problems with it. Um, and, um, you know, just keep each, I think competitors would keep each other honest in that situation. Um, you know, if they say, Oh, you know, I was able to make a nuclear bomb with your AI is like, Oh, it better fix that before you release it, you know, type of thing. Um, Because there's a lot of talk of having a regulatory agency, but the thing is that regulatory agencies, it takes a long time to get one established,

  5. 10:17

    and their rulemaking is very slow. I don't know. I guess I'll talk to Anthropic about this.