Top AI Labs Propose Voluntary Development Slowdown Amid

What happened

When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX head Elon Musk loosely agreed over the weekend to slow down AI development, skeptics spotted an ulterior motive immediately. The AI titans had declared that their aim was to “pace the frontier,” signing on at least partially to a proposal for embedding third-party auditors, regulating domestic labs, and reaching a global slowdown agreement.

To a significant chunk of AI safety researchers and AI nonprofit workers, however, this is simply drawing more attention to an already widely discussed issue. “A lot of people are thinking of this as Dario’s idea, or it’s coming from the CEOs, but that’s false,” said Daniel Kokotajlo, an ex-OpenAI employee who now leads the AI Futures Project, an AI research nonprofit.

“People outside the companies have been calling for this for years … There’s been this growing chorus of voices saying, ‘Please don’t build superintelligence soon. We are not ready. ” Overall, a handful of sources told The Verge they believe that the verbal agreement made by the AI leaders is a step in the right direction.

Big platforms have proposed policies that could hit smaller competitors harder, using altruistic language to justify self-serving goals. They’ve been accused of safety-washing, or making meaningless changes that give the false impression of actual safeguards. It’s no surprise people are concerned this will happen in the AI industry as well, particularly since AI labs’ voluntary safety frameworks have been criticized for years.

Several sources believe that concerns of safety-washing are valid. ” NYU’s Reese compared this gambit to the social media platforms’ playbook a decade ago, when companies began calling for regulatory action to get ahead of impending, less favorable laws.

Why it matters

” The truth is more complicated, according to sources across the industry. The three-step proposal, laid out in an essay by Amodei, is calling for changes long espoused by AI safety advocates. While it could become a substitute for regulation, under Trump, substantial regulation is unlikely anyway.

But experts say that on an issue that’s only likely to grow in importance, AI leaders aren’t the best people to lead the charge. “The industry as a whole needs new champions,” said Nick Reese, an adjunct professor at New York University and the Department of Homeland Security’s former director of emerging tech policy.

“We’ve looked at people like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk as these people who are closest to the problem and working on it every day, and they’re the ones who know best. ” Concerns about AI advancement have been escalating for months, sparked largely by revelations that swarms of agents were behind rogue hacks going on right under the noses of leading frontier labs Anthropic and OpenAI.

Reports from both companies fueled the fire, as did the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who posted a public letter explaining his choice. ” Dire warnings about AI aren’t anything new inside the industry, but Coxon’s letter seemed to break containment. It’s been viewed more than 170 million times on X alone, while Coxon and his story have made the rounds in newspapers and on TV.

What to watch

” All agreed, though, that there was still a lot of work to do to make this verbal commitment a reality, particularly when it comes to making it an ironclad agreement. Many still question the motivations of AI’s leaders. The larger tech industry has spent years getting ahead of regulation by lobbying for its own preferred rules or promising self-regulation.