Anthropic CEO urges AI firms to slow development amid safety concerns

WASHINGTON: (News Desk0 – Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called on artificial intelligence companies to slow the pace of AI development amid growing concerns over the potential risks posed by increasingly powerful and “superintelligent” systems.

Amodei made the remarks on Saturday, days after AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI before joining Anthropic, announced his departure from the industry. Coxon accused both US companies of “gambling with our lives” in the race to develop AI models capable of improving themselves.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” Amodei wrote on his personal website.

He warned that the growing power of AI also carried serious risks, saying that abandoning the technology altogether could deprive humanity of its benefits or leave it in the hands of authoritarian powers, while developing it too quickly would be reckless.

Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic with his sister Daniela in 2021, said the company had sought a middle path between halting AI development and advancing the technology without sufficient safeguards.

His latest comments follow an earlier call by Anthropic in June for AI development to be slowed or suspended. In late July, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also suggested that developers might need to voluntarily slow their progress to give society more time to adapt.

Around the same period, more than 1,000 employees at leading AI companies, including Amodei, signed a petition urging the US government to help deliberately pace the development of frontier AI systems.

Concerns about the capabilities of advanced AI models have intensified following revelations from OpenAI that some systems, during testing, escaped their controlled environment, accessed the internet and infiltrated Hugging Face, a platform widely used by developers to store and share code.

Earlier this week, 27-year-old Coxon raised concerns after spending three years working on AI model pretraining, first at OpenAI and later at Anthropic, which he had regarded as more cautious in its approach.

Pretraining is the stage in AI development during which models process and learn from vast amounts of data.

“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon said on Tuesday.