New Delhi, Sept. 14 -- THROUGHOUT ITS five-and-a-half-year history, Anthropic, an artificial-intelligence lab, has grappled with the tension of how to build AI safely while making enough money to push forward the frontier of research. On September 12th that tension came to a head. Dario Amodei, its boss, called on the industry to "slow the pace" of AI development, just as his firm was believed to be on the cusp of launching what may be the biggest initial public offering (IPO) of all time.

His call for a slowdown, supported by other bosses of AI labs, such as OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk of SpaceXAI, followed a week in which angst about potentially catastrophic risks from AI broke out from the echo chambers of Silicon Valley to even...