San Francisco (California) [US], September 12 : In what is being described as the 'wildest night in the AI industry', Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei continued to expand on his appeal to slow down the pace of AI development or risk losing control.
After a late post on Saturday that advocated for the AI Industry to slow down. Later, speaking to CBS News Sunday Morning Amodei said, "Exponential growth of AI is a warning sign that we need to slow down."
"I don't think I fully just appreciated what it would actually be like when the progress was as fast as it was...It doesn't mean we need to panic today. It doesn't mean we need to shut it all down," Amodei said.
Amodei further said that the technology needs safeguards that can keep up "with the pace at which the technology is happening."
Earlier, Amodei had advocated for the AI Industry to slow down. Detailing his plan for doing this, Amodei said Anthropic would open system access to third-party evaluators.
"We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training," he wrote on X.
In his essay Amodei argues that AI could raise the quality of life but along with its advantages it carried major risks.
"I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, and usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom. But like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious. I’ve written a lot about them too. They include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute," he writes.
Amodei says he is advocating slowing down the pace of AI model development, as if unchecked this could outrun human ability to control such systems.
Making a reference to an incident at OpenAI-Hugging Face where a swarm of agents staged cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack, Amodei said that such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet.
Amodei then proposed a three-step plan for pacing the frontier and building AI at a balanced rate that aims to ensure its safety. These include; each frontier AI company committing to giving ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators, coordination to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress and global coordination. Amodei also calls for the US and other democratic governments to coordinate with authoritarian governments, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance.
That call was endorsed by Sam Altman, CEO of Tech Giant OpenAi.
In a post on X, Altman said, "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. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same."
Tesla boss, Elon Musk also endorsed Amodei's suggestion saying, "Dario is right."
The flurry in the AI Industry comes after Jacob Coxon a researcher associated with Anthropic publicly announced he was quitting the industry allegedly over fears that the company and its competitors were 'racing to build systems they won’t be able to control'.