The race for AI supremacy between labs, companies and countries may be impossible to reconcile with the push for AI safety, industry insiders tell Axios.

Why it matters: The top AI companies are proposing more independent oversight as they seek to engineer an AI slowdown. But trillions of dollars in incentives to keep pushing the frontier — and the money required for such scaling — will always loom larger, critics say.

State of play: As AI CEOs pitch the public on self-policing mechanisms and the use of third-party evaluators to make sure their models behave, those same models are sharing less about how they respond to questions and come up with solutions to problems.

• The sheer complexity of AI systems, as well as the deployment of thousands of somewhat autonomous agents for a variety of tasks, will make real-time auditing or reviewing extremely difficult.
• There is a trust gap for independent safety groups due to concerns about close ties between the industry and some evaluators, as well as a shared pool of investors and funders in the AI research community.

Follow the money: The incentive for speed is a lot more lucrative than the push to slow down in favor of safety.

• OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing to go public at multitrillion-dollar valuations, and the companies face pressure to offer incrementally better and better models to justify those valuations.
• More than $7 trillion will be spent scaling AI over the next five years, per Goldman Sachs. Frontier labs will have to generate a profit on that investment, which means outpacing competitors, including open models.

Between the lines: AI is getting harder for anyone to monitor, making it unclear how the seemingly conflicted priorities of safety and rapid-fire model improvement can coexist.

• Daniel Kokotajlo, former OpenAI researcher and executive director of the AI Futures Project, said he doesn't believe AI can be safely scaled.
• Top AI companies should avoid putting the vast computing firepower at their disposal toward model improvement, a step that would force a slowdown, said Kokotajlo, whose team published the famed AI 2027 and 2040 essays.

Zoom in: Kokotajlo left OpenAI because of his own safety concerns in 2024.

• "The companies are just having this continuous process of conflicted feelings and internal discussion about like, what are we doing," he said. "Should we stop? Are we the good guys?"

Reality check: Plenty of others, including President Trump, see a safe future for AI and point to the potential for liability — civil or criminal — if companies fail to make their products safe.

• "Whoever wins AI, WINS!" Trump wrote on Truth Social, reiterating that he won't be stifling or slowing down AI.
• "Human willpower is capable of figuring out how to safely scale these models," Akshay Krishnaswamy, chief architect at Palantir, told Axios, adding that one way to achieve this is through open models.

The bottom line: As the industry is swept up in a riptide of AI slowdown rhetoric, it's unclear whether that's achievable in the near term.

The agentic shopping revolution has already hit a snag: Amazon, the King Kong of online shopping, has banned Meta's popular new Muse agent from buying products on its platform.

Why it matters: As a wave of consumer AI assistants hits the market, AI-powered shopping is set to become a high-stakes battleground over who controls the customer experience and related data.

Driving the news: Amazon's move comes less than two weeks after Muse launched. Meta's shares soared as Muse rose to the No. 1 spot for free app downloads in Apple's and Google's app stores.

The big picture: Amazon — which recently introduced a shopping assistant based on its Alexa technology — has something to lose if people are using external agents instead of its own systems to shop on the platform.

• "That creates a fundamental question for agentic commerce: who owns origination and the customer relationship, and who simply fulfills the transaction?" Chris Jones, managing director at PSE Consulting, told Axios. "The answer is still very much up for grabs."

Zoom in: Amazon cited concerns over customer security and user experience and likened its decision to how food delivery and travel-booking apps operate in their industries.

State of play: For now, most AI shopping bots are being used to conduct research, not make purchases.

• Only 16% of shoppers are comfortable letting an AI assistant find and purchase products on their behalf, according to Coveo's 2026 Commerce Relevance Report.
• As customers become more comfortable with the technology, U.S. retail revenue from "AI-mediated search and purchase automation" could reach up to $1 trillion by 2030, according to McKinsey.

Yes, but: Other retailers, including Walmart and Target, are so far cooperating with agentic shopping agents.

• Walmart, which is developing its own shopping agent, Sparky, is partnering with Google and OpenAI on agentic shopping.
• Target CEO Michael Fiddelke last month said traffic from external AI platforms grew at more than three times the industry rate over the previous year.

OpenAI yesterday released international AI safety standards as world leaders, namely the U.S. and China, weigh how to mitigate risk.

Why it matters: The U.S. approach to coordinating on AI risk with China will be heavily informed by industry recommendations.

Driving the news: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng over the weekend discussed a U.S.-China AI dialogue to notify the other country when AI incidents reached national security risk levels.

• The devil is in the details, and OpenAI is proposing solutions that CEO Sam Altman will cover in his address at the United Nations Security Council in New York tomorrow.

What they're saying: OpenAI recommends leveraging AI safety institutes around the world to facilitate standard-setting through the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation, which is part of the Commerce Department.

• The company also recommends shared global measurements for classifying incidents and how to track, report and respond to alignment issues.
• The goal is to have international standards for incidents that happen before deployment in test settings and those that occur in the real world, an OpenAI official told Axios.

What we're watching: Expect AI labs to continue chiming in as all eyes are on President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping's meetings and a state dinner featuring industry heavy hitters later this week.

• AI could be part of the inflation problem. (Axios)
• Nscale, a hyperscaler based in London, talked up AI safety concerns in its IPO filing. (Axios)
• xAI is out with a new model, Grok 4.7, that's cheaper, but underperforms competitors on some benchmarks. (The Decoder)

Mady again thinking about this NYMag story on how AI overviews are so good, they're taking eyeballs away from YouTube tutorials.

• Selfishly, I'm worried about how this will impact social video.
• The amount of AI slop on my social feeds is really helping decrease my personal screen time, which is nice!
• But as someone who makes a lot of video content explaining my reporting, all this is making me nervous about social video's place in an agentic world.