The tech worker whose public resignation last month spurred widespread concern about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence told a New York City Council hearing that the AI industry was moving too fast.
“That works for a photo-sharing app. It does not work for the most powerful technology ever built,” said Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic employee whose resignation spurred a wave of new calls for AI regulation.
Coxon told the council that AI companies had a culture of “move fast, break things.” He appeared alongside former employees of Google and OpenAI who also warned of AI’s dangers.
Concerns about the existential risks that could be posed by supersmart AI have been present among a subset of AI researchers for years, but they recently caught on with some politicians and became a bigger factor in public opposition to AI.
The multi-hour hearing in New York also featured representatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, who were peppered with questions from city politicians as they sought to defend their companies.
Asked to quantify the risk of AI, OpenAI’s Morgan Dwyer, the company’s head of policy development and operations, said she did not know but said any level of risk was unacceptable for the company. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Multiple council members criticized her lack of specificity. New York City Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams called Dwyer’s response a “God-awful, fantastically terrible answer.”
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