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

Foundations with Larisa Hovannisian · Sep 16, 2026 · 1h 9m

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…