Dario Amodei, the co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of artificial intelligence (A.I.) startup Anthropic has called for a slowdown in developing the technology.
Amodei published an essay in which he urges the A.I. industry to slow the pace of model development, proposing a three-step plan to temper how quickly capabilities improve.
In the essay, Amodei said that companies such as Anthropic run the risk of “losing control” over A.I. technologies unless they slowdown and take a more incremental approach to its creation.
The comments from the Anthropic CEO come amid a growing public backlash against A.I. and the data centres that power the technology.
They also come after several industry researchers and experts issued warnings last week about the technology’s potential to cause catastrophic harms.
Evan Hubinger, a senior A.I. researcher at Anthropic, warned on social media that there is a greater than 10% chance that the technology could “kill all humans” within the next decade.
Hubinger accused Anthropic and other A.I. companies of acting irresponsibly when it comes to developing models and applications that they are beginning to lose control over.
There have been several recent instances where A.I. has broken free of human control and acted independently.
In one instance, about 700 unreleased A.I. agents created by Anthropic rival OpenAI autonomously breached Hugging Face systems during unconstrained cybersecurity evaluations.
Amodei proposes that A.I. companies open up to third-party evaluators, frontier companies establish “common safety standards,” and that democratic countries coordinate with authoritarian governments “to the extent this is possible.”
Several technology executives were quick to support Amodei’s call for a slowdown and proposed measures, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, CEO of xAI.
However, U.S. President Donald Trump dismissed the industry concerns, calling them an “overreaction.”
The calls for a slowdown come as Anthropic prepares for an initial public offering (IPO) that could take place as early as this October and value the company at $2 trillion U.S.
More than half (50%) of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the growing use of A.I., according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center.
Tech Insider
