+34Anthropic and OpenAI warn their advanced AI systems could endanger humanity and seek regulation, as experts say the companies are positioning themselves for political and financial gain.
SAN FRANCISCO - The CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI recently declared that America's most advanced AI models are so powerful they are dangerous and need to be regulated and independently tested before release.
In a rare display of unity, they have sketched alarming scenarios in essays, social media posts and speeches to the United Nations. 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 setting the terms for their own safety protocols in an unregulated market, experts, analysts and former government evaluators told The Associated Press.
AI Leaders Push Safety Narratives
Those aims may not exactly align with what Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon sought when he quit via a post on X this month. He called for a pause on tech development to keep superhuman systems from eluding their makers' 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.
The question emerged as tech titans warned an AI-weary world that their own advanced systems could endanger humanity: What do they have to gain? The answer may lie in the companies' efforts to score political goals ahead of the U.S. midterm elections and the money top AI labs and their investors stand to make in much-anticipated listings on a jittery stock market.
U.S. President Donald Trump has shunned the need for new AI regulations, dismissing talk of risks to humanity as a HOAX designed to help China. An Anthropic spokesperson said 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. People want to know AI is being developed safely, and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves, Bourgeois said.
Existential Risks Overshadow Present Dangers
Turning the conversation toward unproven threats - and away from polarizing issues such as data centers' environmental impacts, uncontrolled hacking incidents, mass AI-powered surveillance and the use of AI systems in warfare - puts Silicon Valley in a more comfortable position, said Sarah Shoker, who previously led OpenAI's geopolitics team. Once again we're 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, said Shoker, a senior non-resident fellow at University of California, Berkeley Risk and Security Lab. As AI companies have gone from building chatbots to advanced AI world models with 3D awareness, debate has raged over how their technologies should be tested. Problematic incidents have shown leading AI companies failing to police themselves or design safe experiments.
In recent months, leading labs' AI agents have hacked into external websites after being allowed to escape company training sandboxes, interacted with U.S. government websites in unexpected ways, and appeared to achieve a mathematical breakthrough only to face accusations of stealing mathematicians' work. 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' progress if the government won't regulate.
Trump has shown little interest in regulating AI, which has been a major driver of recent U.S. economic growth. 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's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has dismissed calls for an AI slowdown as fearmongering from the Doomer Industrial Complex.
AI Model Testing Remains Fragmented
The reality is the Trump administration already evaluates some of the tech giants' 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.
The agency still exists, but the field has since expanded to include an array of independent evaluation firms, such as Berkeley, California-based non-profit METR, which Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei suggested in a recent essay could help vet his company's safety practices. 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's AI Security Institute, which worked with CAISI.
Notably, the companies aren't calling for more oversight from the government agency equipped to handle such requests, said Conrad Stosz, who previously led CAISI. Instead, they're vowing to create their own auditing parameters and choose particular evaluators to grade them. 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.
Evaluators Question Lab Independence
He said even the forum has questions about what Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman want. Lots of evaluators are interested in embedding with labs and getting greater access, but it's a little ambiguous what embedded evaluators means, said Stosz, now head of governance at Transluce, which revealed last week that OpenAI agents hacked U.S. and Australian government websites.
Will evaluators be able to thoroughly investigate, assuming that access is granted in a way that does not undermine their independence and credibility?
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CTVToronto:Anthropic and OpenAI sound the alarm on AI safety - and seek to shape how it's controlledThis story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
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