Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei has called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in an essay, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology.
Top executives of other major artificial intelligence (AI) companies quickly signed on to the effort. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, Elon Musk, whose SpaceX has been ramping up spending on AI, and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, wrote in social media posts that they agreed on the need for a slower pace.
Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic, wrote in his essay that while he believed the technology could bring many benefits, it was advancing at too rapid a pace for researchers to continue safely.
“Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence – not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up,” Amodei wrote.
He has warned about the safety risks of AI for years. But his essay amounted to one of the most full-throated calls for urgent action from a leading AI company executive to date.
Amodei called for independent auditors to check the companies for safety standards and urged global co-operation in creating rules around AI development.
The appeal for an industry-wide pause follows months of escalating concerns across the technology industry as AI model development has made significant strides. Tensions rose further after the leading AI labs discovered security breaches carried out by their own programs without their knowledge.
On Tuesday (local time), Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, resigned and posted a series of social media posts about how the leading AI labs were not responsibly developing the technology, setting off a furore.
Hours after Amodei published his essay, Altman posted a statement agreeing that a slowdown in AI development was necessary.
“This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks,” Altman wrote. “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”
Musk, in a post on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, said simply: “Dario is right.” And Hassabis wrote that Amodei’s essay was a step in the right direction “for meeting this critical moment”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Mike Isaac
Photographs by: Karsten Moran, The New York Times
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