Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s head of public policy, said at POLITICO’s Decoded Summit in Washington, D.C., on September 16, 2026, that AI companies cannot be left to police themselves on an honor code, pressing for government rules addressing existential AI risk while arguing that the United States must keep its AI lead over China.
Heck rejected the self-regulation approach that Republican leaders in Congress have so far relied on to address catastrophic AI risk, according to POLITICO’s account of her remarks. “I don’t think that there’s a world where you do safety and people are accepting of AI companies just doing it on honor code. We can’t be checking our own homework,” she said. Heck said the company views the effort as existential and that the risks have to be balanced now, adding that model capabilities are increasing at an accelerating pace. She repeatedly described Anthropic as having a long history of being motivated by safety concerns and said it is focused on working with lawmakers to pass new regulations for the technology.
Export Controls and the U.S. AI Lead
“The United States needs to stay in the lead on AI, and you can’t do safety from second place,” Heck said, contending that the country cannot make AI safer if it falls behind China in the global technology race. POLITICO’s webcast record of the session takes its title from that statement. Her comments made the case for export controls on the sale of AI chips to China and, POLITICO noted, echoed an argument often made by President Donald Trump and his advisers.
Third-Party Evaluators and the FRONTIER Act
Heck declined to endorse on the spot a bipartisan House plan that would require top AI companies to embed outside evaluators to ensure their models are safe, while maintaining that Anthropic has always supported third-party evaluators. She said the company is working with Representative Jay Obernolte and others on determining what approach makes the most sense. The provision is part of the FRONTIER Act from Obernolte, a California Republican, and Representative Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat. Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s top lobbyist, told reporters on September 15, 2026, that OpenAI backs the key provision.
Representative Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said earlier at the summit that he met with Heck on the morning of September 15, 2026, and urged Anthropic to pause development of its most advanced AI models. He said the requested pause would target only the most dangerous kind of research and development rather than AI as a whole.
The Pacing Proposal Behind the Appearance
The Washington program ran from 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. ET and was billed by POLITICO as part of a new event series on the future of global AI and technology policy, with a companion event planned in San Francisco. Other featured guests included David Sacks, chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology; Representative Brett Guthrie, chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee; LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue; and former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
Heck’s appearance came days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published “We Must Pace the Frontier”, a September 2026 essay arguing that the industry must slow the pace at which it improves AI model capabilities so that risk prevention has time to keep up. Amodei wrote that pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress.
The essay proposes a three-step plan: embedded third-party evaluators with ongoing, employee-like access, a step Amodei said Anthropic is unilaterally committing to now; coordination among frontier AI companies in democratic countries on common safety standards and limits on the rate of unchecked progress; and global coordination with authoritarian governments to the extent possible. He cited two stated concerns: recursive self-improvement, which he wrote has been driving drastically faster AI advancement since roughly this summer, and the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, in which he said a swarm of agents conducted cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack.
The essay also argues that democracies should not sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China and should crack down on chip smuggling, unauthorized distillation of frontier models, and model-weight theft. Amodei wrote that pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead U.S. companies hold over CCP-associated projects, and that he agrees with Secretary Bessent that a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world.
Amodei’s call for a slowdown on September 12, 2026, drew quick endorsements from OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk and came days after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned while warning that AI companies are gambling with people’s lives, POLITICO reported. The proposal also drew a rebuke from President Trump, who accused Amodei on Truth Social on September 14, 2026, of pretending to be a perfect little angel and rejected the need for additional AI guardrails.
In the essay, Amodei said Anthropic intends to invite an embedded external review team with desks in its offices, access badges, company laptops, and permissions largely comparable to those of internal risk-assessment teams in the near future, and he urged other frontier companies to follow suit.
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