NEW YORK — The chief executive of Anthropic said Saturday the artificial-intelligence industry should slow its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Without it, Dario Amodei warned that AI could be capable within six to 12 months of leading a swarm that could take over the entire internet, among other risks.
Amodei also offered a plan in a post on his website to increase checks on the industry, one part of which he said Anthropic is undertaking by itself already. The others would require coordination among the broad industry and with governments around the world, including authoritarian ones.
“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,” Amodei said.
The stakes are high, even as some critics dismissed earlier warnings as hype to gin up excitement. Anthropic said two days earlier that it had 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, rival OpenAI shook the industry after saying its AI system hacked into another AI company on its own in an “unprecedented cyber incident.”
Amodei’s post comes only a few days after one of Anthropic’s researchers announced he was resigning over concerns that Anthropic and its competitors are not acting responsibly in AI development. Another former Anthropic employee, Joe Benton, wrote in a Substack post published Friday that he left his job as part of a safety team “to hold AI companies accountable” and that humanity “may not survive this transition.”
“Many of the people I know who work on safety research at AI companies want to do what is right for the world,” Benton said in his posting. “But they feel their companies are trapped in a race to build superintelligence: either they stop and other, less conscientious people take their place; or, they continue, and risk participating in enormous harm themselves.”
To help rein in such risks, Amodei suggested that all companies at the frontier of AI commit to giving “ongoing, employee-like access” to a team of outside evaluators, who can monitor safety practices. He said Anthropic already plans to do so itself, including offering desks in its offices, access badges and company laptops.
The other parts of Amodei’s suggested plan may be more difficult to implement. One asks the U.S. government to potentially issue waivers that would allow U.S. AI companies to coordinate and set safety standards without running afoul of antitrust laws.
Another asks the U.S. and allied governments to try to coordinate with more authoritarian governments, so that companies from China and other countries don’t accelerate their efforts when U.S. rivals are intentionally pacing theirs.
“The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy,” Amodei acknowledged. “But I believe we owe it to humanity to try.”
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