Three prominent figures in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk, have agreed on the need for slowing down the development of AI and for providing permanent evaluators with access to AI systems to ensure safety standards.
On Saturday, Anthropic's Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei published a blog outlining his concerns about the risks associated with AI, including the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and significant economic disruption. He proposed a three-step plan to address these risks, with the first step being the provision of third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to Anthropic's systems to verify safety standards and assess AI models during training.
Amodei argued that commercial incentives could drive a 'race to the bottom', making the risks more acute. He stated that while Anthropic had prioritised caution over speed and prudence over profit, he had become convinced in recent months that fully addressing the risks of AI would require more efforts.
In the blog post, Amodei also mentioned a resignation by an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, who expressed concerns about the firm and the industry racing to build AI systems they could not control. In a series of social media posts, Coxon claimed that the people building AI 'earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade' and that no other human activity poses this level of danger.
OpenAI's Sam Altman agreed with Amodei that 'we need to pace' the most capable AI systems. He said that committing to having independent evaluators is a great idea and that OpenAI would follow suit. Elon Musk, whose company xAI has developed the generative AI product Grok, also agreed with Amodei.
US Senator Bernie Sanders called for a ban on artificial superintelligence, stating that Amodei, Altman, and Musk agreeing to slow down the development of AI was not enough. He urged US President Donald Trump and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to negotiate a treaty to pause AI development and ban superintelligence 'before it is too late'.
Source:
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