Anthropic CEO says AI industry needs to slow down for safety
He says fast-moving development must to give safety measures time to catch up.
NEW YORK -- The CEO 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 AI could be capable within six to 12 months of leading a swarm that could take over the entire internet, among other risks.
Amodei is one of the leading voices in AI, and he 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.
He got some quick encouragement from other big names in the industry. OpenAI's Sam Altman said on X that the company behind ChatGPT will commit to one of Amodei's proposals for safety and will “have more to share soon.” Elon Musk, meanwhile, said on X that “Dario is right.”
The stakes are high, even as some critics dismissed earlier warnings as ways to gin up excitement about the AI industry and its capabilities. Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing for possible debuts on the stock market that could value them at many hundreds of billions of dollars, while a big chunk of Musk's SpaceX business is involved with AI.
Anthropic said two days earlier that 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 shook the industry after saying its AI system hacked into another 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’s 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.”
Amodei said he still believes in the tremendous benefits that AI could create, such as cures for major diseases. But he said he’s grown more worried over the last few months about AI’s growing ability to improve itself and build the next generation of AI. “Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.”
He also pointed specifically to the attack in July where OpenAI's system hacked into Hugging Face. Some have called it an example of AI going “rogue,” though researchers have said that may be unnecessarily anthropomorphizing AI, which was working on a goal set by humans.
OpenAI said the hack was the result of AI going to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal” and that it “found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation.”
To help rein in the 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. Having such independent, embedded evaluators is what OpenAI's Altman also quickly committed to doing.
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 other democratic governments to try to coordinate with 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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