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Yann LeCun Mocks Dario’s AI Warning: “Everyone Should Make Fun of Them Now”

Yann LeCun has mocked Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call to slow the development of frontier AI models, arguing that similar warnings have been made before without justification.
AI industry figures Yann LeCun and Dario Amodei pictured amid debate over frontier AI safety and calls to slow advanced AI development.
September 14, 2026 12:17 PM IST | Written by Vaibhav Jha

French American Computer Scientist Yann LeCun asked people to “make fun of” Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic and other AI/tech CEOs demanding a pause on advanced AI research and development by referring threats to humanity, suggesting a pattern of such fear-mongering statements as a marketing stunt.

On Saturday, Amodei released a statement on X wherein he called for “slowing the pace” of improving the capabilities of AI models, till the time companies put in adequate safeguards and are aligned with the models.

 

Amodei’s statement was supported by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Elon Musk, CEO of xAI, Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google Deepmind, Andrej Karpathy, co-founder OpenAI along with other tech leaders.

However, renowned computer-scientist Yann LeCun, known for his pioneering work on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), mocked Dario Amodei, and reminded users on X that he had made similar comments in the past.

Replying to an X user who shared a screenshot of 2019 article where Dario Amodei, the then research director at OpenAI, was quoted saying that ChatGPT was too dangerous to release open-source, Yann LeCun replied stating, “Right. Dario was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019.

I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now.”

 

For context, Dario Amodei was earlier part of OpenAI, and in 2021, he along with other co-founders announced setting up AI venture Anthropic,

Dario has demanded for a voluntary pause commitment among US based AI CEOs to halt the pacing of frontier AI models until safeguards are in place and a common minimum safety framework has been introduced by the government.

According to Amodei, the concerns have been raised due to advancing capabilities of frontier AI models especially in context of the recent OpenAI-Hugging Face hacking incident where a swarm of AI agents breached a popular platform.

“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails,” claimed Amodei in his recent statement.

Recently, an Anthropic researcher had resigned from his post and stated that scientists at leading AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, are aware that advanced AI research would one day lead to superintelligent AI that can pose existential threat to humanity.

Amodei’s statement also comes in the wake of a recent cyber report released by Anthropic where over two dozen cases of “misuse of Claude” has been reported from countries like China, Russia, Iran and Yemen with the misuse ranging from ballistic missile development, torpedo weapon system, hacking, phishing, covert operations and surveillance, from December 2025 to August 2026.

Amodei’s statements have been supported largely by the US AI/tech industry as pundits expect a common groundwork for AI safety legislation to be introduced soon.

 

“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon,” said Altman.

Read More: Explained: Why is Anthropic Calling for a Global Pause on Frontier AI?

Author

  • Vaibhav Jha, editor and co-founder at AI FrontPage

    Vaibhav Jha is an Editor and Co-founder of AI FrontPage. In his decade long career in journalism, Vaibhav has reported for publications including The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, and The New York Times, covering the intersection of technology, policy, and society. Outside work, he’s usually trying to persuade people to watch Anurag Kashyap films.

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