Anthropic is proposing that the world’s top AI companies come up with a coordinated way to pause development of advanced AI systems, warning the technology is improving so quickly there’s a risk humans could lose control. The company behind the Claude chatbot said in a Thursday blog post that as cutting-edge AI gets increasingly faster at carrying out tasks, “it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause” its development, per the AP. Anthropic said its research institute plans to explore the issue in tandem with others and “take actions” to help build the systems for a credible slowdown or pause, without specifics.
Anthropic rival OpenAI argued for a different approach in a report published Wednesday, saying that “democratic governments—not private companies acting alone—must ultimately determine the rules, safeguards, and accountability mechanisms.” “Our view is that decisions about the pace of AI innovation should not be left to any one lab, company, or special interest group,” it said. AI models are getting faster, with rapid increases in how quickly they can carry out software tasks like coding on their own, Anthropic said in its post. Based on current trends and given enough computing power, an AI system could be able to design and develop its own successor, in what is known as “recursive self-improvement.”
Self-building AI would be a major technological milestone that would bring benefits in science, healthcare, and other areas, Anthropic said, but it “also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems.” Anthropic’s post comes after a warning this week from University of Toronto researchers who showed how AI tools could be used to create a new kind of AI “worm” that adapts its hacking strategy as it spreads from device to device. “It’s not just the biggest, most powerful language models that pose the security concerns,” lead researcher Nicolas Papernot said.
The Anthropic post authors, company co-founder Jack Clark and Marina Favaro, head of its research institute, said the pause would be used to enable “societal structures and alignment research” to keep up with AI advances. The proposed coordination would let advanced AI labs verify that rivals have actually stopped or slowed their work, “and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret.”
