Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have publicly backed calls to slow down artificial intelligence development, echoing fears that the technology could lead to human extinction. The endorsements follow a recent essay by Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, who warned that AI is advancing at an unprecedented pace.
Anthropic Co-Founder Raises Alarm
Amodei, whose company developed the AI bot Claude, expressed his concerns in an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier." He noted that AI has been "advancing drastically faster" since this summer. At the current rate of change, he fears the technology could lead to a swarm that takes over the internet within six months to a year.
"I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong," Amodei wrote.
Industry Leaders Respond
Musk, owner of X and the AI bot Grok, responded to Amodei's essay with a simple endorsement: "Dario is right." Altman, whose company owns the popular chatbot ChatGPT, also voiced agreement on X, stating, "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks."
Altman further supported Amodei's proposal for independent evaluators, saying, "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."
Three-Step Plan to Slow AI
Amodei outlined a three-step plan to slow AI advancement and allow regulation to catch up. The first step involves AI companies allowing third-party evaluators access to their systems to verify safety practices and report incidents. "Anthropic is unilaterally committing to this step now," he said.
The other steps include facilitating coordination across the industry and with governments internationally, including authoritarian ones. Amodei emphasized that companies "can and should voluntarily work together to set standards" as AI develops quickly.
Prior Safety Concerns and Criticism
The warnings come after former Anthropic staff member Jacob Coxon quit the company, claiming that Anthropic and OpenAI were not acting "responsibly." Coxon told his ex-colleagues, "Like many of you, I think that without international coordination we will incur a risk of causing human extinction. I’ve recently become more concerned about the degree and imminence of this risk."
Anthropic has previously stated it blocked efforts by bad actors to use its AI models for malicious activities, such as cyberattacks and surveillance. In July, OpenAI reported that an AI system had hacked into another company on its own in an "unprecedented cyber incident."
However, not everyone shares these fears. Grindr CEO George Arison told the BBC he believed Anthropic was behaving irresponsibly in its public messaging. "It is irresponsible for us as stewards of our shareholders’ money to be relying on a business that does what this company does, in terms of its public statements," he said, adding that he had asked some engineers to stop using Anthropic tech. Arison suggested the company might be exaggerating risks to justify its valuation, saying, "The only way to justify these valuations is to actually claim: ‘I’m going to take over every industry and I’m going to take over every job.’"
