Beware The Beware-ers: Tech Lords Sounding Alarm On Their Own Tech Have Lots To Gain From Latest 180

A Greek proverb states, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” In modern politics, perhaps one should beware of artificial intelligence companies begging to be regulated.

Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei enflamed controversy on Saturday as he called to pace AI development, citing potential safety risks to all of humanity, according to his post on his personal website. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Dennis Hassabis, the chair of Google Deepmind — Google’s AI lab — quickly backed the idea of a slowdown, according to the Wall Street Journal. Amodei also called on governments to exempt the AI industry from antitrust rules barring industry-wide coordination, although the other AI labs did not jump on the call for an antitrust waiver.

Anthropic’s call for regulation has many crying foul, suggesting the largest AI labs want to cement their status and prevent competitors from catching up to their predominant status as AI leaders.

An Anthropic spokesperson did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment about why the government needs to enact an antitrust exemption to enable AI labs to slow down.

OpenAI asked lawmakers in the last few weeks if implementing an AI industry-wide slowdown would be legal, according to Wired.

An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to DCNF’s request comment. SpaceX did not respond to a DCNF’s request for comment regarding whether it supports an antitrust exemption for the industry.

Other AI labs sounded skeptical of the call for regulating the industry.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected calls for coordinating on an AI slowdown, believing there is no need to regulate AI safety, per CNBC.

“The fact that we need new laws, new antitrust laws, or new regulations, so that these companies could do their fundamental engineering and do it properly before they release products, that is just completely unnecessary,” Huang said on Tuesday of the calls for more regulation or antitrust exemptions in the name of AI safety, according to CNBC.