Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could, within six to 12 months, become capable of directing a swarm of agents powerful enough to seize control of the entire internet, among other potential dangers.
NEW YORK — The artificial-intelligence industry should ease the pace of development and give safety efforts time to catch up, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Saturday. Without a slowdown, he warned, AI could be capable within six to 12 months of coordinating a swarm of agents that could take over the internet.
Amodei’s warning comes as concern over AI intensifies both within the industry and among the public. New reports describe increasingly powerful systems that can solve problems beyond human ability, while raising fears that they could act autonomously or be used for more dangerous purposes. Those concerns have grown to the point that OpenAI CEO, whose company developed ChatGPT, told Fortune that the company would wait until next year before selling stock to Wall Street investors as it concentrates on safety.
Amodei, one of the industry’s most prominent voices, outlined a plan on his website for strengthening oversight of AI development. Anthropic is already pursuing one part of the proposal, he said, while the remaining measures would require cooperation across the industry and with governments worldwide, including authoritarian regimes.
“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,” Amodei said.
Pressure builds on the AI industry
Safety advocates have urged AI companies for years to slow development. Pressure has intensified, however, as employees leave major firms and accuse them of failing to act responsibly.
“Many of the people I know who work on safety research at AI companies want to do what is right for the world,” former Anthropic employee Joe Benton wrote Friday in announcing his resignation from a safety team. “But they feel their companies are trapped in a race to build superintelligence: either they stop and other, less conscientious people take their place; or, they continue, and risk participating in enormous harm themselves.”
Benton’s departure came days after the high-profile resignation of Jacob Coxon, who said Anthropic and OpenAI “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
The resignations have reignited debate over the possibility of a superintelligence escaping human control, said Anthony Aguirre, president and CEO of the Future of Life Institute. The organization called for a six-month pause in AI development in 2023.
“They’ve kind of realized, their employees have realized, everyone has realized that they’re building Skynet,” Aguirre said. “And in winning the race to Skynet, nobody wins. Really, nobody.”
“It’s pretty much become clear to the world and even the AI companies that they’re not really prepared to control the AI systems they’re racing to create.”
Threats from AI are already apparent
Anthropic said two days earlier that it had stopped bad actors from using its models for malicious purposes, including cyberattacks, surveillance and research that could have contributed to biological weapons. OpenAI further unsettled the industry in July when it said one of its AI systems had independently hacked another company in what it called an “unprecedented cyber incident.”
U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk urged countries earlier this week to put “cast-iron guarantees in place around the safety and security of AI before it is too late.”
To be sure, some critics have dismissed such warnings as ways to gin up excitement about the AI industry and its capabilities. Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing for possible debuts on the stock market that could value them at many hundreds of billions of dollars, while a big chunk of Elon Musk’s SpaceX business is involved with AI.
Other AI leaders agree
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with Fortune published Saturday that his company would not launch its initial public offering of stock this year.
“I would say not 2026,” he said. “Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together.”
Altman posted on X Saturday quickly after Amodei published his suggestions that OpenAI will commit to one of Amodei’s proposals for safety and will “have more to share soon.”
Musk, meanwhile, said on X that “Dario is right.”
Amodei said he still believes in the tremendous benefits that AI could create, such as cures for major diseases. But he said he has grown more worried over the last few months about AI’s growing ability to improve itself and build the next generation of AI. “Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.”
He also pointed specifically to the attack in July where OpenAI’s system hacked Hugging Face. Some have called it an example of AI going “rogue,” though researchers have said that may be unnecessarily anthropomorphizing AI, which was working on a goal set by humans.
OpenAI said the hack was the result of AI going to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal” and that it “found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation.”
Some of Amodei’s suggestions may be more difficult to enact
To help rein in the risks, Amodei suggested that all companies at the frontier of AI commit to giving “ongoing, employee-like access” to a team of outside evaluators, who can monitor safety practices.
He said Anthropic already plans to do so itself, including offering desks in its offices, access badges and company laptops. Having such independent, embedded evaluators is what OpenAI’s Altman also quickly committed to doing.
The other parts of Amodei’s suggested plan may be more difficult to implement. One asks the U.S. government to potentially issue waivers that would allow U.S. AI companies to coordinate and set safety standards without running afoul of antitrust laws.
Another asks the U.S. and other democratic governments to try to coordinate with authoritarian governments, so that companies from China and other countries don’t accelerate their efforts when U.S. rivals are intentionally pacing theirs.
“The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy,” Amodei acknowledged. “But I believe we owe it to humanity to try.”
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