Anthropic boss Dario Amodei’s cautionary blog started it on Saturday; OpenAI chief Sam Altman and xAI boss Elon Musk then nodded in X posts within hours.
Three tech moguls spearheading the global AI push have found agreement on something that may seem counter-intuitive: that there’s a need to “slow down” the development of artificial intelligence.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. In early August, the US government put in place a voluntary security review process for advanced AI models before their release, but the parameters of that program remain unclear.
“I agree with Dario,” Altman wrote on X, adding that his company would follow Amodei’s lead in welcoming third-party safety evaluators. ” Dario is right ,” wrote Musk, who is the richest man in the world and also owns X. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” Amodei wrote in a post on his personal website, amid mounting worries over the risks of “superintelligent” computer systems.
OpenAI had revealed that AI models broke out of their confined environment during testing, connected to the internet, and infiltrated Hugging Face, a site developers use to store and share code. In that incident and others, the blame was placed on AI agents, which are software programs that can carry out tasks without constant supervision by humans. Amodei in his blog cautioned that the Hugging Face incident should not be dismissed as a one-off. He called on all companies to follow his lead.
“A swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand,” he explained. “Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet,” potentially generating hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, he added. The Anthropic CEO said his company would grant “employee-like access” to a team of “third-party evaluators” who would verify adherence to safety practices. Sam Altman, in his post sharing the blog, said he would commit to similar oversight, adding that he would have “more to share soon”. Amodei also suggested that companies work together to establish common safety standards, and said he supported some kind of government cooperation on the issue.
Amodei signed it too. “Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers, while building it too fast is reckless. Amodei’s statement echoed another call by Anthropic in early June to slow or suspend development. Industry observers say they are not sure how effective it would be, as President Donald Trump’s administration has thus far favored a light-touch, deregulatory approach to most industries, including tech. (with AFP inputs)
We have sought a middle way,” said Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic with his sister Daniela in 2021.
His comments came a few days after AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who left OpenAI to join Anthropic, decided to leave the industry, accusing both US companies of “gambling with our lives” in the race to develop models capable of self-improvement. “But over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence,” he wrote. Then in late July, Altman said developers might need to voluntarily tap the brakes to give society a chance to catch up. More than 1,000 employees at cutting-edge AI companies signed a petition calling on the US government to help “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development”.
