Over nine startling hours yesterday, the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models.

• Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost.

The big picture: AI's unrelenting growth has hit an inflection point with the public, Washington and even the companies building it, Axios' Ben Berkowitz writes.

• Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.

⚠️ Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.

1. At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.
2. An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying "Dario is right." Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.
3. At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier." In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company.
4. At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: "Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment."

🔎 Between the lines: Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms.

• Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the "threat" of AI.
• The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal.

Reality check: Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches.

• Let's see whether they actually agree on what oversight ("embedded third-party evaluators") and "slow" mean, then follow through.

🇨🇳 Friction point: No one in China is having the same kind of we'd-better-stop moment.

• Influential Silicon Valley tech voices, including former Trump official David Sacks, spent yesterday highlighting the counterargument that slowing down just lets adversaries — with no such safety qualms — catch up. In a late-night post, Sacks effectively dared OpenAI and Anthropic to voluntarily pace the AI frontier without waiting for the government. "If you don't, we'll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop."
• Amodei even acknowledged that a safety regime only really works if authoritarian governments come to the table, too. "Pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead that U.S. companies have over authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party," he wrote. "If we slow down by more than this amount, then (unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk."

The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.

• Share this story ... Read Amodei's essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier."

Republicans are outspending Democrats in almost every battleground Senate race this month as Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) looks to the GOP's cash advantage to help hold his majority.

• Why it matters: The post-Labor Day rush is here, with $390 million (and climbing) of Senate campaign ads headed for voters' TVs, tablets and phone screens, Axios' Stef W. Kight and Hans Nichols report.

By the numbers: In three crucial states — Ohio, Texas and Michigan — Republicans have reserved at least $10 million more in September advertising than Democrats.

• 🍑 Only in Georgia, a state where incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff is now favored to win reelection, are Democrats outspending Republicans.

Keep reading.

For months, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has quietly courted European leaders — in France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia and beyond — to pull closer to the European Union.

• Carney has even floated a new title for Canada, the Wall Street Journal reports: "Associate Member of the European Union."

👀 The intrigue: Trump has spent the last 18 months trying to rewire the global trading order by brute force, Axios' Ben Berkowitz writes.

• A spat over milk and whiskey usually wouldn't be enough to wreck a $900 billion relationship between neighbors. But Carney is taking the long view that Trump's order may outlast Trump's presidency.

Go deeper.

Early risers can spot three bright planets stretching across the morning sky for the rest of the month — and they won't need a telescope to see them, Axios Seattle's Christine Clarridge writes.

• Why it matters: Saturn, Mars and Jupiter can all be seen, weather permitting, in September's early morning hours, according to EarthSky.

How it works: The planets will spread in a long arc along the ecliptic — the path the Sun, Moon and planets follow — like lights strung across the sky.

• To see all three, head outside before dawn and scan from east to west: Jupiter will be the bright one in the east, followed by reddish Mars and Saturn farther west.

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Americans are facing a rising tab as a multi-decade borrowing binge collides with a spike in energy prices caused by the Iran war.

• Long-term interest rates are surging, as are consumer prices. It's a toxic mix of near-term inflation pressures and years of fiscal imbalance, Axios' Neil Irwin reports.

📈 Driving the news: The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note rose to 4.97% Friday, up a full percentage point since the end of February, and only a hair below its high since 2007. That rate helps set borrowing costs across the economy, from business loans to mortgages.

• The rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has risen in lockstep, reaching 7.08% Friday, per Mortgage News Daily — the highest in more than a year.
• Gasoline is now at a national average of $4.31 a gallon, while diesel has climbed to over $6 a gallon.

👀 All this means the Fed is now expected to raise its target interest rate this week, but longer-term borrowing rates are set in global markets — and determined by bigger forces.

• Read on.

"As reading declines, ideas are spreading not by text but by spoken word" — a lasting piece of Charlie Kirk's legacy, The Economist reports ($):

"Ideas that were once disseminated by headlines and columns are now being conveyed by TikToks and podcasts. As people spend more time absorbed in their screens and their AirPods, the human voice is making a comeback. That has consequences for how people communicate — and perhaps for the kinds of ideas that spread."

🤔 The intrigue: As oration comes back into vogue, so do its quirks. Written arguments are typically clean and structured, while spoken ones can repeat and ramble as people work toward their conclusion in real time.

• "The oral turn also helps explain the success of ... Donald Trump," The Economist notes.
• "Some have even compared his 'tagging' of enemies — 'crooked Hillary,' 'sleepy Joe' and so on — to Homer, who used epithets like 'ox-eyed Hera' and 'crooked-counseled' Cronos to lodge characters in audiences' minds."

Get ready for a new No. 1 team when AP's Top 25 college football poll is released this afternoon.

• No. 4 Texas staked its claim after wiping out a 20-point, fourth-quarter deficit to beat top-ranked Ohio State 24-23 last night in Austin. The comeback is the largest fourth-quarter rally ever for a win against an AP No. 1 team, according to Sportradar.

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As more of us track our sleep through wearables and try different strategies to optimize nighttime rest, high sleep scores are becoming status symbols, The Wall Street Journal reports (gift link).

• People get scores from their wearables, smart mattresses and even baby monitors.

How it works: Sleep scores aren't perfectly precise, but help spot patterns. If you know your baseline, you can experiment with changes like sleeping with white noise or on a cooler mattress topper to see if they meaningfully raise your score, CNET reports.