Tech CEOs agree to AI slowdown

NEW YORK, United States (AFP) — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday called on artificial intelligence (AI) firms to slow down the development of the powerful technology, amid mounting worries over the risks of "superintelligent" computer systems.

His comments came a few days after AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who left OpenAI to join Anthropic, decided to leave the industry, accusing both United States companies of "gambling with our lives" in the race to develop models capable of self-improvement.

OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who owns xAI, quickly chimed in to say they agreed with Amodei's assessment, as pressure builds for improved oversight.

"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 post on his personal website.

"Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers, while building it too fast is reckless. We have sought a middle way," said Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic with his sister Daniela in 2021.

"But over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence."

Amodei's statement echoed another call by Anthropic in early June to slow or suspend development.

Then in late July, Altman said developers might need to voluntarily tap the brakes to give society a chance to catch up.

More than 1,000 employees at cutting-edge AI companies including Amodei signed a petition calling on the US government to help "deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."

OpenAI had revealed that during testing, AI models broke out of their confined environment, connected to the internet and infiltrated Hugging Face, a site developers use to store and share code.

In that incident and others, the blame was placed on AI agents, which are software programs that can carry out tasks without constant supervision by humans.