As tech titans warned an AI-weary world that their own advanced systems could endanger humanity, the question emerged: What do they have to gain?<\/p>\n
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The answer may lie in the companies\u2019 efforts to score political goals ahead of the\u00a0U.S. midterm elections\u00a0and the money top artificial intelligence labs and their investors stand to make in\u00a0much-anticipatedlistings on a jittery stock market.<\/p>\n
The CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI recently declared America\u2019s cutting-edge models are so powerful,\u00a0they\u2019re dangerous, and need to be regulated and independently tested before being released. In a\u00a0rare instance\u00a0of unity, they have sketched alarming scenarios in essays, social media posts and speeches to the\u00a0United Nations.<\/p>\n
Along the way, they are shaping the conversation around how their technology should be controlled. With their rhetoric, the companies appear to be seeking public favor and to set the terms for their own safety protocols in the unregulated market, experts, analysts and former government evaluators told The Associated Press.<\/p>\n
Those aims may not exactly align with what Anthropic engineer\u00a0Jacob Coxon\u00a0sought when he quit via a post on X this month, calling for a pause on tech development to keep \u201csuperhuman\u201d systems from eluding their makers\u2019 control. But the companies saw his post as an opportunity to highlight their own safety efforts and position themselves as cautious market leaders, just when they need fresh capital before going public on Wall Street.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump has shunned the need for new AI regulations, dismissing talk of risks to humanity as a \u201cHOAX\u201d designed to help China.<\/p>\n
An Anthropic spokesperson said in response to questions for this story the company has been calling for regulation for several years. An OpenAI spokesperson, Liz Bourgeois, noted the company recently paused training of its most advanced models.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople want to know AI is being developed safely, and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves,\u201d Bourgeois said.<\/p>\n
Calls for slowdown shift the conversation on AI risks<\/h4>\n
Turning the conversation toward unproven threats \u2014 and away from polarizing issues such as data centers\u2019 environmental impacts, uncontrolled hacking incidents, mass AI-powered surveillance and the AI systems\u2019 use in warfare \u2014 puts Silicon Valley in a more comfortable position, said Sarah Shoker, who previously led OpenAI\u2019s geopolitics team.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce again we\u2019re talking about existential risk, while deprioritizing a number of other safety-critical risks that exist today. If you look at the use of AI in military tech, you can see that these systems are already used to kill people,\u201d said Shoker, a senior non-resident fellow at University of California, Berkeley Risk & Security Lab.<\/p>\n
As AI companies have gone from building chatbots to advanced AI \u201c\u00a0world models\u00a0\u201d with 3D awareness, debate has raged over how their technologies should be tested.<\/p>\n
Problematic incidents have shown leading AI companies failing to police themselves or design safe experiments. In recent months, leading labs\u2019 AI agents have\u00a0hacked into external websites\u00a0after being allowed to escape company training sandboxes,\u00a0interacted with U.S. government websites\u00a0in unexpected ways, and appeared to achieve a mathematical breakthrough only to face accusations of stealing mathematicians\u2019 work.<\/p>\n
OpenAI representatives told reporters recently that they have talked with AI companies including Anthropic and Google about pausing development. They also argue they need independent auditors to check the labs\u2019 progress, if the government won\u2019t regulate.<\/p>\n
Leading labs press their oversight vision<\/h4>\n
Trump has shown little interest in regulating AI, which has been a major driver of recent U.S.\u00a0economic growth.<\/p>\n
The Republican president himself has struck deals with Silicon Valley firms that more closely tie the economy to their successes. San Francisco venture capitalist David Sacks, who co-chairs Trump\u2019s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has dismissed calls for an AI slowdown as fearmongering from the \u201cDoomer Industrial Complex.\u201d<\/p>\n
The reality is the Trump administration already evaluates some of the tech giants\u2019 models through a little-known federal agency, the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation. Democratic President Joe Biden created the agency in 2023, when it was heralded as a clearinghouse for labs to voluntarily submit advanced AI models for testing.<\/p>\n
The agency still exists, but the field has since expanded to include an array of independent evaluation firms, such as Berkeley, California-based nonprofit METR, which Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei suggested in a recent essay could help vet his company\u2019s safety practices.<\/p>\n
But unlike regulated sectors like restaurants, financial services or aviation, there are no universal standards for how to test the safety and security of AI systems, said Andrew Strait, who recently left the United Kingdom\u2019s AI Security Institute, which worked with CAISI.<\/p>\n
Notably, the companies aren\u2019t calling for more oversight from the government agency equipped to handle such requests, said Conrad Stosz, who previously led CAISI. Instead, they\u2019re vowing to create their own auditing parameters and choose particular evaluators to grade them.<\/p>\n
Stosz now works at one such evaluation lab that has worked with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google to test their systems, and also chairs the AI Evaluator Forum, which is drafting best practices for the field. He said even the forum has questions about what Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman want.<\/p>\n
\u201cLots of evaluators are interested in embedding with labs and getting greater access, but it\u2019s a little ambiguous what embedded evaluators means,\u201d said Stosz, now head of governance at Transluce, which revealed last week that OpenAI agents hacked U.S. and\u00a0Australian government websites. \u201cWill evaluators be able to thoroughly investigate, assuming that access is granted in a way that does not undermine their independence and credibility?\u201d<\/p>\n
Companies position themselves as safe bets<\/h4>\n
For Harrison Rolfes, a Pitchbook senior research analyst, AI companies\u2019 calls for caution seem meant to curry favor with investors ahead of public offerings and the midterms, when the political winds could shift.\u00a0Democratic governors\u00a0already are rushing to show they\u2019re taking the warnings seriously.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the AI giants can block smaller competitors\u2019 growth by positioning themselves as the safest bet for investors, as well as for AI chipmakers and tech companies such as Nvidia and Google, which in turn can benefit from deals that provide the giant AI companies compute power, Rolfes said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re creating a wall or a moat within this sector. \u2026 It\u2019s genius and they\u2019re all going to make a lot of money,\u201d Rolfes said. \u201cThat\u2019s where I see this heading, having the top companies in the world just creating their own wall, and then using the safety as the reason.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not all AI companies\u00a0endorse a slowdown. Chipmaker Nvidia\u2019s CEO Jensen Huang said in a phone conversation with Trump \u2014 a call he took onstage at a conference \u2014 that he agrees there has been excessive AI alarmism and companies can choose to pace themselves.<\/p>\n
Daniel Kokotajlo, who left OpenAI in 2024 over concerns similar to Coxon\u2019s, said he continues to worry that AI systems are advancing faster than companies can control, and fears\u00a0existential scenarios\u00a0such as AI\u2019s potential to supercharge the creation of bioweapons, nuclear war or other catastrophes.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of this talk is actually a way to sort of dissipate and redirect this political will that has built up, rather than actually channeling that political will to do something good,\u201d said Kokotajlo, who now leads an AI safety advocacy organization and said he counseled Coxon before he resigned. \u201cJust please don\u2019t do the thing that\u2019s going to get us all killed.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
#giants #warn #existential #risk #build #competitive #moat #safety #analyst<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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