Artificial intelligence company Anthropic suggested Thursday a global pause on building the most powerful AI systems as the latest models are beginning to show signs they could escape human control.The San Francisco-based company, which makes the Claude family of AI models, said in a report that a worldwide slowdown in cutting-edge AI development would "likely be a good thing" -- but warned that if only one company stopped, rivals would simply race ahead.
"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," it said.
Getting a real pause to work would mean multiple major AI companies in multiple countries – most notably the US and China – all agreeing to stop at the same time, under rules everyone could actually verify, Anthropic said.
"Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures," it said.
The company has faced pushback from others in the industry – and officials in the White House – who say its focus on worst-case scenarios overstates the risks and amounts to a strategy for slowing rivals under the cover of safety concerns.
