Dario Amodei called for AI companies to slow down and the industry immediately released more models than ever. This chart shows 45 AI models released in September, the highest monthly total on record and roughly four times the monthly pace seen through most of 2024. OpenAI alone released 10 models, while Google, Anthropic, Meta and ElevenLabs released three each.The chart captures the prisoner’s dilemma at the center of AI. Nearly every lab agrees that the frontier may be moving too quickly but no company wants to be the only one that takes its foot off the accelerator. OpenAI released 10 models during the same month that its leadership supported pacing the frontier. There is also an important distinction between the number of models and the speed of capability improvement. Companies can release cheaper, smaller or specialized versions without making a major frontier leap. Anthropic says that Sonnet 5.5 improved coding and knowledge work but did not advance the overall intelligence frontier. Still, 45 releases in one month show that the AI race is not slowing down in any practical sense. Models are becoming products, and labs now need constant releases covering different prices, speeds, context windows and workloads. Even if frontier capability jumps become more controlled, the number of models reaching the market could continue exploding. Bullish on AI!