Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says he’s “become convinced” in recent months that AI needs to slow down. And rogue OpenAI agents are part of the reason.
Amodei cited the July Hugging Face breach, in which OpenAI agents broke out of their testing environment to hack into the AI platform and then hide their tracks, as one of the catalysts for his heightened alarm.
“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet,” he wrote in a blog post published Saturday.
Amodei also cited the rapid advancement of AI in recent months and its increased capacity for “recursive self-improvement,” which is essentially an AI model’s ability to learn on its own.
Amodei also proposed a three-step plan to slow down AI development to ensure the tech’s safety “while still achieving its benefits and grappling with important geopolitical dilemmas.”
Central to Amodei’s plan is embedding independent safety evaluators inside frontier AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, giving them “employee-like access” to the companies’ systems and work.
“This is the key step for verifiability of any pacing commitments,” Amodei wrote. “Anthropic is unilaterally committing to this step now.”
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
