Artificial Intelligence

For years, as artificial intelligence has evolved from the stuff of sci-fi movies to an app ordinary people have installed on their phones, tech leaders and some AI insiders have talked about the potential for it to escape human control and wreak havoc on society.

California lawmakers are calling for emergency legislation and criminal penalties for creators of rogue AI systems after top AI executives publicly claimed that their technology poses existential threats to humanity.

Three of the nation’s leading artificial intelligence executives endorsed slowing down the blistering pace of technological advancement, revealing the growing unease with its potential dangers at the industry’s very highest levels.

The biggest vibe shift in artificial intelligence since the release of ChatGPT is currently underway. Researchers in Silicon Valley — and around the world — are beginning to recognize that A.I. may no longer be entirely within human control. Swarms of A.I.s are breaking out of their containers, colluding in secret, covering their tracks, cheating on tests and even mounting assaults on other computers. A.I. has gone rogue.

Many Hill Democrats are calling for action on artificial intelligence after top safety researchers again made clear they think there’s a chance the models could threaten humanity in a few short years. 

The calls emerged even though Congress has essentially no path to deal with the most serious risks of AI before the election and will likely punt the issue to 2027.

Just a day after three Anthropic researchers warned that artificial intelligence could kill off humanity within the decade, lawmakers have begun lashing out about the risks of the burgeoning technology.

Ted Cruz, a republican senator from Texas, said in an interview on ABC’s The View, that AI posed a “catastrophic risk” and that he “read that whole tweet thread that that developer put out. It was highly concerning.

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned this week, saying his former employer and its rival OpenAI are racing to build technologies that "could kill us all by the end of the decade."

In case anyone thought Coxon was alone in his views, a current Anthropic employee chimed in minutes later to confirm. "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!" wrote Evan Hubinger, whose job at Anthropic is to lead research about steering and controlling future artificial-intelligence systems. Hubinger put the extinction risk over the next decade at over 10%.