SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
Washington: Three researchers at Anthropic revealed the artificial intelligence giant is worried AI will lead to the extinction of humanity within a short time frame, in a stunning public admission that prompted fresh calls for urgent AI regulation in the US and elsewhere.
The chain of events was sparked by the resignation of Anthropic researcher David Coxon, who also worked at OpenAI, and said in a series of posts on X that neither company was acting responsibly.
“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” he said. “Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade … No other human activity poses this level of danger.”
Coxon’s post has now been viewed more than 100 million times.
Anthropic is the creator of the AI system Claude. Responding to Coxon’s statement, the alignment science lead at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, said his former colleague was correct.
“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Hubinger wrote.
“I personally think it is [more than a] 10 per cent within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
Another Anthropic leader, scalable oversight lead Samuel Marks, supported the stunning assessment of AI’s destructive power.
“AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes),” he said. “This could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”
Marks noted that AIs could not be programmed to behave as their developers would like, and they frequently misbehaved severely. He said he continued to work on safety research at Anthropic because he hoped it would reduce the chance of an extinction-level outcome.
US President Donald Trump has championed AI and its enabling infrastructure, and framed regulation as a burden that would give China – the US’ great strategic rival – the edge in the AI revolution.
However, US politicians who have previously called for additional regulation were shocked by the statements and called for urgent action.
“The very people building this technology admit that it could threaten the future of humanity,” said independent senator Bernie Sanders, who is introducing a bill to pause AI development.
Don Beyer, a Democratic congressman from Virginia and a former diplomat, said he hoped the warnings from Anthropic insiders would spur a swift response to issues he had been raising for years.
“Congress needs a sense of urgency on AI that is has not had so far,” he said. “Doing nothing on AI is unacceptable and dangerous.”
Two other Democrats working on AI regulation bills also called for swift action.
“The call is coming from inside the house,” said Massachusetts congresswoman Lori Trahan. “Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway. It’s past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job.”
Her colleague Greg Casar from Texas, who is working with Sanders on the bill to ban superintelligence, said the situation was now “an emergency”.
Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican congresswoman from Florida, called for a special session of Congress to determine what the future of AI looked like in the US.
“There are very real impacts to society as we know it. Partisan politics aside, there are massive implications of a race towards superintelligence,” she said on X.
The point was not to stop AI development but to protect Americans while securing the benefits, Luna said. “This is happening whether or not we want it to.”
Some state governors including Florida Republican Ron DeSantis and Illinois Democrat JB Pritzker also voiced concerns about the statements, although DeSantis noted there may be some hysteria in the commentary aimed at investors ahead of upcoming initial public offerings.
The comments from the three Anthropic insiders were not the only dramatic interventions from senior people inside the AI industry this week.
Jakub Pachocki, the chief scientist at ChatGPT creator OpenAI, wrote on the company’s blog that broad government interventions were required, with AI machines barrelling towards a kind of intelligence their developers didn’t fully understand.
“This is a time that calls for extreme caution,” Pachocki wrote. “I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence.”
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.
