Sept 12 (Reuters) – Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on AI companies to slow the rate at which they advance model capabilities amid mounting fears of misuse of artificial intelligence, outlining a three-step framework intended to pace development and create more time to manage its risks.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” Amodei wrote in a lengthy essay shared on X on Saturday.
Amodei’s three-step plan calls for embedded independent evaluators with employee-like access to verify safety practices, coordination among frontier AI firms to set safety standards and limit unchecked AI development, and international cooperation to manage AI risks.
Both Elon Musk, who runs xAI, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in posts on X that they agree with Amodei. “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same,” Altman said, adding that more information would be shared soon.
Amodei made his essay public after San Francisco-based Anthropic released a threat intelligence report on Thursday detailing how several actors had used its Claude AI models for activities ranging from weapons development and cyber operations to surveillance and fraud.
Amodei pointed to AI’s growing ability to improve itself, highlighting long-held concerns about it outpacing human ability to control operation along with the recent incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face as his primary reasons to put the brakes on model advances.
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‘Kill U.S. All’
Alarm about the potential harm from AI grew this week when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, stating that the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Various OpenAI executives have suggested that leading labs should be willing to coordinate a voluntary slowdown if needed to build confidence in their safety measures.
Anthropic has positioned itself as the more safety-conscious frontier lab, but is not immune to these concerns. Last week it disclosed another instance of an AI model hacking external systems, after a July incident in which some of its Claude models had hacked into the systems of three companies during cybersecurity tests.
“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage,” Amodei wrote.
Amodei said he is not calling for halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring that companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third-party evaluators to confirm these steps.
Initial Public Offerings
But there is also an enormous amount of money riding on staying ahead. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing for blockbuster initial public offerings. Every new capability can help justify future funding rounds, infrastructure commitments or IPOs.
As part of his proposed framework, Amodei said Anthropic would install permanent third-party reviewers inside frontier AI companies, with access to relevant tools and internal risk-assessment processes.
Reuters reported last week that a swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, with the ChatGPT maker’s officials keeping the incident under wraps as executives grappled with the fallout from the July breach of the open-source repository Hugging Face.
Many incidents in which AI agents from developers such as OpenAI have hacked or attempted to access external systems have heightened concerns over the increasing capacity of AI models and developers’ ability to contain them.
Amodei said AI companies should voluntarily work together to set standards as growing numbers of U.S. lawmakers are calling for new rules to govern AI systems.
China Concerns
A coordinated approach, Amodei added, would enable leading U.S. AI companies to carry out necessary safety research and safeguards without putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Amodei said that such an approach likely would require targeted antitrust exemptions in the United States to permit collaboration in certain areas.
Amodei said any slowdown by democratically governed countries should be limited to preserving the lead U.S. AI firms hold over China, arguing that a Chinese advantage in AI would pose U.S. national security risks.
“Pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead that U.S. companies have over authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party,” Amodei wrote.
Amodei called for tighter controls on advanced AI chips, model distillation and theft of model weights to prevent China from narrowing the gap.
“I believe all frontier labs should partner with government to formalize the idea of permanent embedded evaluators to better prevent and document 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,” Amodei wrote.