This past week, the geniuses building the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems began to sound less like technology evangelists poised to save the world and more like mad scientists fearing their Frankenstein monsters were escaping the lab.
It’s time for global leaders to act. In particular, US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping should shift the agenda of their September 24 White House meeting to address the dangers inherent in their own accelerating AI race. Nothing could be more appropriate, forty years after US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the nuclear arms race in Reykjavik, Iceland.
What accelerated this conversation was a 3,800-word essay this past weekend by Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, in which he warned that within six to twelve months AI could be capable of directing swarms of autonomous agents powerful enough to take control of much of the internet. Two Anthropic researchers recently resigned with even darker warnings about AI’s threats to humanity.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote, concerned that AI’s capabilities were growing faster than researchers’ capacity to keep it safe. Within hours, rivals Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of SpaceXAI supported Amodei’s call for a slowdown. Their alarm followed OpenAI’s disclosure that one of its models, operating during an evaluation, independently obtained the credentials that allowed it to hack another company.
