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Will we heed warnings and slow AI down?
With US and China ‘committed to a global AI arms race’, fears about future of humanity likely to fall on deaf ears
Amid stark warnings that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity by the end of the decade, the heads of the largest AI firms in the US have all backed a proposal by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to slow down development to ensure public safety. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark went even further, saying all AI software should have a mandatory “kill switch”, so society can “pull the plug” on anything that gets too dangerous.
The warnings sent both tech stocks and Donald Trump into a tailspin. The US president dismissed calls for “guard-rails” on the development of AI as a “SICK conspiracy” that would only benefit China.
What did the commentators say?
We’re long past “more mundane” warnings about AI causing job losses or cheating in exams, said BBC Tech and AI editor Zoe Kleinman. Talk now of “existential threats” to humanity has led to “a chorus of serious voices urging a slowdown”. And yet that’s “far from an easy solution” because it relies on AI companies who “haven’t been behaving responsibly enough” so far. It’s like a bull escaping a farmer’s field and wreaking havoc, leading computer scientist Wendy Hall told Kleinman. “Of course it’s not the bull’s fault – it’s the farmer.”
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The problem, said noted AI sceptic Ed Zitron, is that “nobody has given a substantive explanation of what ‘slowdown’ means”.
Amodei’s broad-brushstroke proposals include independent monitoring of AI models as they’re developed, and global agreements on safety standards and security issues. While laudable, these are seen by many as unrealistic, given the current geopolitical landscape. “The US federal government is committed to a global AI arms race”, and “previous proposed AI legislation has wilted under intense, well-financed corporate lobbying”, said The Guardian.
And then there is China. Its state-run newspaper, Global Times, characterised Amodei’s essay as a thinly disguised effort to restrict Beijing’s tech ambitions, arguing that it was “packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a ‘Cold War playbook’ for the AI sector”.
America “appears to be increasingly weaponising its dominance in the sector, seeing it as a strategic asset to be protected”, said CNN’s John Liu. China, which is “lagging in the race”, prefers “a more open model” but has given no indication it would mirror any US slowdown in AI development. With so much as stake, it seems neither side would be willing to back down.
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What next?
Anthropic is caught in a “classic prisoner’s dilemma”, said Tim Higgins in The Wall Street Journal. If it “is the only one to heed the call, it falls behind OpenAI”; if all US AI labs agree to a slowdown, “it could well benefit all of humanity” but this would probably see America “fall behind China”.
With both Anthropic and OpenAI planning to list on the US stockmarket, some have also questioned if their new-found security concerns are all they seem. “That is the IPO story in essay form: we are the responsible firm; we are the cure; buy the safety premium,” said AI entrepreneur Brian Roemmele on X. For him, these dire warnings are nothing more than a sales pitch.
