Musk and Altman back calls to ‘slow down’ development of AI

Elon Musk and Sam Altman have backed a call from the boss of Anthropic for the artificial intelligence (AI) industry to “slow down” to give safety measures time to catch up.

In an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier, Dario Amodei said he is concerned that since this summer, AI has been “advancing drastically faster”.

Given the rate of AI development, Mr Amodei is worried that within six to 12 months it could be capable of leading a swarm that could take over the entire internet.

The entrepreneur, whose company is behind the AI assistant Claude, shared a three-part plan for building the technology at a “balanced rate”.

“I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,” Mr Amodei said.

The essay has been supported by other industry leaders, including Mr Musk and Mr Altman.

Responding to Mr Amodei’s essay on X, Mr Musk wrote: “Dario is right.”

Open AI chief executive Mr Altman wrote on the social media site: “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. We’ll have more to share soon.”

Mr Amodei offered a plan to increase checks on the industry, proposing that AI companies should give access to third-party evaluators who would verify safety practices and report incidents.

“Anthropic is unilaterally committing to this step now,” he said.

The other steps would require co-ordination among the broad industry and with governments around the world, including authoritarian ones.

Mr Amodei said AI is developing quickly, adding that companies within the industry “can and should voluntarily work together to set standards”.

Anthropic previously said it blocked efforts by bad actors to use its AI models for malicious activity, such as cyber attacks, surveillance and research that could have led to biological weapons.

In July, OpenAI – the makers of ChatGPT – shook the industry after saying its AI system hacked into another company on its own in an “unprecedented cyber incident.”