Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have backed calls for the AI industry to ‘slow down’ development of the technology over fears it could bring about ‘human extinction’.
Last week, former Anthropic staff member Jacob Coxon quit the company amid claims it and competitor OpenAI were not acting ‘responsibly’.
He told his ex-colleagues: ‘Like many of you, I think that without international coordination we will incur a risk of causing human extinction.
‘I’ve recently become more concerned about the degree and imminence of this risk. I also find myself viscerally fearing the intelligence explosion where previously those concerns were unemotional.’
Now, Anthropic’s co-founder Dario Amodei has voiced his own concerns about the rate of AI development.
Amodei – whose company developed the AI bot Claude – said in an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier that he is concerned AI has been ‘advancing drastically faster’ since this summer.
At the current rate of change, Amodei is concerned that the tech could lead a swarm and take over the internet in six months to a year.
‘I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,’ he said.
The essay has garnered support from other big names in the tech industry.
X owner Musk – whose AI bot, Grok, made headlines after it was found that social media users were using it to generate images of mostly women in states of undress – wrote: ‘Dario is right.’
Amodei offered a three-step plan to slow the advancement of AI and allow regulation to catch up.
This included suggesting AI companies allow third-party evaluators access to their systems to verify safety practices and report incidents.
‘Anthropic is unilaterally committing to this step now,’ he said.
Meanwhile Altman, whose company owns the popular chatbot ChatGPT, wrote on X: ‘I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.
‘Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.’
The other steps in Amodei’s plan include facilitating co-ordination across the industry and with governments internationally, including authoritarian ones.
Amodei said that with AI developing quickly, companies ‘can and should voluntarily work together to set standards’.
Anthropic previously said it blocked efforts by bad actors to use its AI models for malicious activity, such as cyberattacks, surveillance and research that could have led to biological weapons.
In July, OpenAI said an AI system had hacked into another company on its own in an ‘unprecedented cyber incident.’
But some have dismissed the tech industry leaders’ fears.
Grindr CEO George Arison told the BBC he believed Anthropic was behaving irresponsibly in terms of its public messaging.
‘It is irresponsible for us as stewards of our shareholders’ money to be relying on a business that does what this company does, in terms of its public statements,’ he said, adding that he’d asked some engineers at the company to stop using Anthropic tech.
‘Maybe they actually believe it, or you could argue they’re saying it because it’s a great way to gin up more investor support, because the only way to justify these valuations is to actually claim: “I’m going to take over every industry and I’m going to take over every job, and my AI is going to be doing all that work.”‘
Metro has contacted Anthropic for comment on the statement.