Sam Altman, Elon Musk Back Anthropic CEO’s Call to Slow AI Development as Safety Concerns Mount

Three CEOs across America’s leading AI companies are publicly calling for a global slowdown on the technology’s development. The message comes days after an Anthropic employee resigned from the company and posted a statement saying industry leaders were “gambling with our lives” and neglecting to responsibly evolve their models. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei shared a 3,800-word essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier” on Saturday, writing that he believes AI could provide benefits to humanity but that the industry “must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.” Amodei stated that his concerns grew after considering the potential for AI models’ “recursive self-improvement” to outrun companies’ abilities to control them, citing recent unsanctioned cyberattacks enacted by OpenAI models collaborating without human intervention. Amodei’s essay went on to call for AI labs to “partner with government to formalized the idea of permanent embedded evaluators to better prevent and document the internal alignment incidents like those that have occurred in the last few months, and to implement regulation focused on keeping capabilities in balance with safety.” He also argued such an effort would necessitate a global agreement with other nations. Rival AI executives Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI shared statements concurring with Amodei’s essay. “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Altman wrote in a social media post. “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. We’ll have more to share soon.” “Dario is right,” Musk simply wrote in a post sharing Amodei’s essay. Amodei’s statement comes days after Jacob Caxon, a former AI researcher at Anthropic, resigned from the company and warned that leaders at his former employer and OpenAI were not “acting responsibly” in developing the technology, In social media posts shared Tuesday, Caxon claimed that executives he’s met “earnestly believe that (AI) could kill us all by the end of the decade.” “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” he wrote in a statement posted to social media. “This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately.” While Amodei’s essay is positioned as an altruistic message, some critics argue that such proposed regulations would also secure Anthropic’s position as a leader in the AI industry and create a regulatory environment that would inhibit the growth of smaller competitors.