Anthropic policy chief says AI companies can't be expected to operate on 'honor code'

Sarah Heck, Head of Public Policy at Anthropic, speaks during the Politico Decoded Summit September 16, 2026 in Washington, DC.Win Mcnamee | Getty ImagesSarah Heck, Anthropic's head of public policy, said she doesn't think artificial intelligence companies can manage oversight and safety concerns by following an "honor code.""We want to work with government to figure out what makes sense," Heck said at the Politico Decoded summit in Washington, D.C. "We can't be checking our own homework, and that's very clear."Heck's comments come days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei rocked the tech sector by calling on the industry to deliberately slow the pace of model development. Amodei proposed a three-step plan on Saturday to temper how quickly model capabilities improve without "sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead in AI."Industry executives including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind Chair Demis Hassabis quickly voiced support for Amodei's proposal, which came after industry researchers last week raised the alarm on AI's potential to cause catastrophic harm. "Dario is right," Musk wrote in a post on X on Saturday.Other tech leaders, inc...