The plea for caution comes the same week it beat AI archrival OpenAI to filing for an IPO
It would be “good for the world” to slow down the pace of AI development, according to a blog post from Anthropic, which this week began the process of going public with a confidential IPO filing.“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,” stated a blog post written by Anthropic co-founder (and former Reg scribe) Jack Clark and researcher Marina Favaro.Executing an actual pause would take a negotiation and monitoring effort on par with nuclear accords, including the agreement from all of the frontier AI labs, as well as support from policy makers around the world. Even then, there is a possibility that some will not abide by any restrictions.
“Training runs are far easier to conceal than missile silos, their inputs are general-purpose, and the incentive to defect quietly is enormous, because whoever continues while others pause could inherit the lead. A credible pause also has to specify what triggers it, what lifts it, and who adjudicates."
