Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (shown below), came out over the weekend issuing a proposal, saying that the AI industry needs to slow down, reports Associated Press. He says industry leaders need to allow safety measures time to catch up and warns of risk of AI taking over the internet within a year if not.
Anthropic disclosed in July that their AI models had hacked into three companies on their own, reported the BBC. They had checked their own systems after OpenAI revealed their models had done the same.
The Wall Street Journal also reported last week on a former Anthropic worker who quit after fearing AI advancement. Jacob Coxon believed that lab and competitors were competing against each other building systems that will eventually not be in their control, a claim that was later backed by Anthropic’s top scientist Evan Hubringer.
The Anthropic jail break and the subsequent whistleblower are sending shockwaves through the industry and in Washington over fears that AI's progress could lead to an extinction level event.
The threat seems so dire it has House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Democrat aspiring speaker Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) actually agreeing. As AP reports, Johnson states this is a “top priority for me and for the Congress, while Jeffries calls for “decisive action now.”
According to The Guardian, tech CEOs Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Amodei, fierce competitors in the AI space, all say basically the same thing: AI needs to slow down.
“There are real dangers. It doesn't mean we need to panic today. It doesn't mean we need to shut it all down. It's a warning sign that we need to slow down,” Amodei said to CBS News.
However, China pushes back on Amodei’s proposal, says Forbes, claiming this “call to slowdown AI” is fearmongering. The country’s state-owned tabloid, Global Times, suggests this proposal has a hidden agenda, targets China and is a “Cold War playbook” for AI.
Robert Maginnis, author and AI analyst, says that one wildcard could make any efforts on this side of the Pacific moot.
“You should have done something ten years ago. Now we have an emergency, then we have an AI war,” Maginnis states.
He says we are trending toward a 1960s-style Cold War like the U.S. had with the Soviet Union. And while hindsight makes that look less threatening than it actually was for those living through the first one, Maginnis says our country might not be so lucky the second time around.
“We went to the cliff and were looking over it, and the Soviets blinked. We may not be so fortunate the next time,” Maginnis says.
With that, President Donald Trump has no plans on slowing down AI development, claiming competition with China. While guardrails could be put up, he said that he ultimately thinks negative forces are bringing things up that won’t happen.
While Johnson agrees with the guardrails, he also agrees with Trump on the China front.
