Anthropic Calls For Slowdown In Global AI Development

Anthropic suggested Thursday that artificial intelligence companies worldwide should consider slowing AI development, claiming the technology is on track to autonomously design its own successors.

The company wrote on its website that “if it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications,” it believes “that would likely be a good thing.” The blog post also notes that “if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe.”

“Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures,” according to the blog post.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

“We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology,” the blog post continues. “The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. These systems would enable frontier AI developers to verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret. If such systems existed, we expect that we would slow down or temporarily pause, if other developers at or near the frontier also did so in a verifiable manner.”

Anthropic further stated that any “meaningful slowdown or pause” in AI development “would require multiple well-resourced labs at or near the frontier, in multiple countries, agreeing to stop under the same conditions.”

The post comes after CEO Dario Amodei, alongside Google’s DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sent a letter urging Congress to implement safeguards when technology companies order synthetic DNA and RNA, a crucial step in developing certain vaccines and biotech innovations, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

Some risks associated with AI agents stem from unintended autonomy, “where systems optimize for a goal through destructive means, lack of accountability in complex decision-making loops, and systemic instability,” according to Secureleap.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].