Anthropic CEO urges AI companies to slow model development

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on artificial intelligence (AI) companies to slow the rate at which they advance model capabilities amid mounting fears of misuse of AI, outlining a three-step framework intended to pace development and create more time to manage its risks.

"We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain," Amodei wrote in a lengthy essay shared on X on Saturday.

Amodei's three-step plan calls for embedded independent evaluators with employee-like access to verify safety practices, coordination among frontier AI firms to set safety standards and limit unchecked AI development, and international cooperation to manage AI risks.

Both Elon Musk, who runs xAI, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in posts on X that they agree with Amodei. "Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same," Altman said, adding that more information would be shared soon.

Amodei made his essay public after San Francisco-based Anthropic released a threat intelligence report on Thursday detailing how several actors had used its Claude AI models for activities ranging from weapons development and cyber operations to surveillance and fraud.

Amodei pointed to AI's growing ability to improve itself, highlighting long-held concerns about it outpacing human ability to control operation along with the recent incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face as his primary reasons to put the brakes on model advances.

Alarm about the potential harm from AI grew this week when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, stating that the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."

Various OpenAI executives have suggested that leading labs should be willing to coordinate a voluntary slowdown if needed to build confidence in their safety measures.

Anthropic has positioned itself as the more safety-conscious frontier lab, but ​is not immune to these concerns. Last week it disclosed another instance of an AI model hacking external systems, after a July incident in which some of its Claude models had hacked into the systems of three companies during cybersecurity tests.

"Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it's my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage," Amodei wrote.

Amodei said he is not calling for halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring that companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third-party evaluators to confirm these steps.