Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — The CEO of Anthropic said Saturday the artificial-intelligence industry should slow its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Without it, Dario Amodei warned AI could be capable within six to 12 months of leading a swarm that could take over the entire internet, among other risks.

Amodei also offered a plan in a post on his website to increase checks on the industry, one part of which he said Anthropic is undertaking by itself already, The others would require coordination among the broad industry and with governments around the world, including authoritarian ones.

“I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,” Amodei said.

The stakes are high, even as some critics dismissed earlier warnings as hype to gin up excitement. Anthropic said two days earlier that it blocked efforts by bad actors to use its AI models for malicious activity such as cyberattacks, surveillance, and research that could have led to biological weapons. In July, rival OpenAI shook the industry after saying its AI system hacked into another AI company on its own in an “unprecedented cyber incident.”