Anthropic CEO outlines plan to ‘pace the frontier’

What happened

We’ve been seeing increasingly dire warnings from AI researchers about the dangers of artificial intelligence, and even comments from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that it may be time to “pace” AI development. But what would that actually look like? In a new blog post, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei not only echoed the call to “pace the frontier,” but also outlined three broad strategies for doing so.

” Amodei also acknowledged the spectre of Chinese AI dominance that’s often raised an argument against slowing development. ” With Amodei’s past willingness to acknowledge AI’s potential dangers, and with the company’s relative openness to certain forms of regulation, some AI boosters have already criticized him as a doomer whose comments have fed the current AI backlash.

Why it matters

And he said Anthropic is “unilaterally committing” to one of them. The debate over AI safety and alignment intensified this week after researcher Jacob Coxon wrote that he’s resigning from Anthropic over concerns that the leading AI companies are “gambling with our lives” while the people building the technology “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” a claim repeated by others at Anthropic.

” “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote. ” His proposed first step would involve “embedded evaluators” from third-party organizations like METR — evaluators who can verify that AI companies are actually following their pacing and safety commitments and can also ensure that safety incidents get reported.

” That means giving evaluators company badges, desks, and laptops, and providing access “mostly comparable to what internal risk assessment teams have,” with exceptions when required by law or contracts. ” Such coordination might seem unlikely, both due to the apparent animosity between Altman and Amodei and also because their companies are reportedly worried that a coordinated pause could lead to antitrust scrutiny.

What to watch

In response, Amodei said he’s tried to offer a “balanced” perspective” and argued that the backlash is “fundamentally a crisis of trust,” as people have become skeptical of tech companies, the tech industry, and the government. Industry critics have also been skeptical about these apocalyptic AI warnings, suggesting that they’re a distraction from the harm that the technology is already causing.

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