Plenty of eyebrows went up this summer when one by one, the leaders of frontier AI labs announced that they were each calling for a slowdown in AI development.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Grok creator Elon Musk were among those arguing that the tech was simply moving too fast to ensure it doesn’t fly off the rails. Several autonomous hacking sprees had already raised hackles earlier this year, highlighting the danger of AI models breaking out of containment and infiltrating third-party companies like Hugging Face.
Then Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon lit the powder keg with his high-profile departure, arguing that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI were acting “responsibly,” and that there was a more than ten percent chance of AI “killing all humans.”
But is it really just a matter of ensuring the safety of their AI models that’s motivating tech leaders to suddenly call on the industry to pump the brakes? As tech journalist Steven Vaughan-Nichols argues in a piece for Computerworld, there could be plenty of other ulterior motives at play.
