Anthropic CEO outlines plan to slow AI development
We’ve been seeing increasingly dire warnings from AI researchers about the dangers of artificial intelligence, and even comments from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that it may be time to “pace” AI development. But what would that actually look like?
In a new blog post, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei not only echoed the call to “pace the frontier,” but also outlined three broad strategies for doing so. And he said Anthropic is “unilaterally committing” to one of them, with Altman chiming in to say OpenAI will follow suit.
The debate over AI safety and alignment intensified this week after researcher Jacob Coxon wrote that he’s resigning from Anthropic over concerns that the leading AI companies are “gambling with our lives” while the people building the technology “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” a claim repeated by others at Anthropic.
Amodei’s post doesn’t didn’t explicitly mention Coxon’s resignation or his concerns, but the CEO wrote that two things convinced him it’s time to take a more cautious approach to AI development: the OpenAI-HuggingFace hack, and the fact that “AI has been advancing drastically faster” in recent months, particularly with its “growing ability to build the next generation of AI.”
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
Other AI executives seem to have reacted positively to Amodei’s post, with Altman writing, “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.” And SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted, “Dario is right.”
Three Proposed Strategies
Embedded evaluators: Amodei’s proposed first step would involve “embedded evaluators” from third-party organizations like METR — evaluators who can verify that AI companies are actually following their pacing and safety commitments and can also ensure that safety incidents get reported. Amodei compared these evaluators to regulators who have been embedded with bank employees, and he said that inviting them in is “something Anthropic is unilaterally committing to (and calls on governments to require other frontier companies to match).” That means giving evaluators company badges, desks, and laptops, and providing access “mostly comparable to what internal risk assessment teams have,” with exceptions when required by law or contracts. Altman also said this was a “good idea” and said OpenAI would do the same.
Common safety standards: Next, Amodei called for the leading AI companies “within democratic countries” to coordinate “common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress.” Amodei alluded to antitrust concerns, writing that “for antitrust reasons, it’s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions — they don’t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.” He also acknowledged the specter of Chinese AI dominance but argued export controls on chips and crackdowns on model distillation could “slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3–5 years.”
Global coordination: Lastly, Amodei called for “global coordination,” where the United States and its allies “attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible.” He suggested opportunities for agreement on “prohibiting certain narrow and obviously dangerous uses of AI, such as using AI for the production of biological weapons or allowing users to do so.”
Industry critics have been skeptical about these apocalyptic AI warnings, suggesting that they’re a distraction from the harm that the technology is already causing. Journalist Brian Merchant wrote that proposals similar to Amodei’s “would likely only wind up serving Anthropic and OpenAI; it’s what regulatory capture looks like in action.”
In his new post, Amodei wrote that he continues “to believe that AI can enormously improve the quality of human life.” “My desire to achieve these benefits is undimmed,” he said. “But the benefits will only be achieved if we build the technology in the right way, and — so long as we use the time we gain well — it is worth taking unusually deliberate care to get it right.”