Anthropic CEO calls for slower AI development over safety concerns

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday called on artificial intelligence (AI) companies to slow down the development of the powerful technology, as concerns mount over the risks of “superintelligent” computer systems.

Superintelligence is the theoretical point when AI’s capabilities exceed human intelligence.

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 and industry giants of “gambling with our lives” in the race to develop models capable of self-improvement.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” wrote Amodei in a post on his personal website.

“AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious.”

“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. We have sought a middle way,” said Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic, which developed AI model Claude, with his sister Daniela in 2021.

“But over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence,” added the Anthropic chief executive.

Amodei’s statement echoes another call by Anthropic in early June to slow or suspend development. Then in late July, Sam Altman, head of Anthropic rival OpenAI – developers of ChatGPT – said developers might need to voluntarily pump the brakes on their rapid advances to give society a chance to catch up.

Around the same time as the June statement, more than 1,000 employees at cutting-edge AI companies, including Amodei himself, signed a petition calling on the US government to help “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”

OpenAI had revealed that during testing, the AI models broke out of their confined environment, connected to the internet and infiltrated Hugging Face, a site developers use to store and share code.

Earlier this week, 27-year-old Jacob Coxon, sounded the alarm after spending the past three years pre-training AI models, first at OpenAI and then, this year, at its rival Anthropic, which he considered more cautious in its approach.

Pretraining is the stage where AI models absorb vast quantities of data of all different kinds, from pictures to videos to voice recordings, which help it understand things to then be able to generate images or answer user prompts on chat platforms.

“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” said Coxon in a chain of posts on X on Tuesday.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he added.

Additional sources • AFP