SAN FRANCISCO — The CEO of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in an essay Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology.
Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic, wrote that while he believed the technology could bring many benefits, it was advancing at too quick 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 said.
Amodei has warned about AI safety risk 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.
The appeal for an industrywide pause follows months of escalating concerns across the technology industry as AI model development has made significant strides at companies such as OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind and Anthropic.
Tensions rose further after the leading AI labs discovered security breaches carried out by their own programs without their knowledge. In one incident this year, OpenAI’s systems breached an AI startup called Hugging Face, which was not detected until Hugging Face informed OpenAI weeks after it had happened.
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On Tuesday, 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 and were thus gambling with people’s lives, setting off a furor. Other AI researchers have called on their leaders to pause AI development, while some are forming splinter groups to raise more awareness about the risks of AI.
Hours after Amodei published his essay, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, posted a statement to social media 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.”