Will Conservatives Constrain the Machines?

Will Conservatives Constrain the Machines?

The need for a political response to AI is becoming increasingly urgent.

Elevenlabs Text to SpeechAudioNative Player...

The end of human civilization has gotten a little more thinkable.

Last week, a 27-year-old named Jacob Coxon quit his lucrative job at Anthropic, arguably the world’s most important AI lab, because he believed his employer was building something that could “kill us all by the end of the decade.” Remarkably, his concerns were affirmed by former colleagues of his who stayed with the company: Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic’s efforts at alignment (that is, ensuring that AI is tethered to the values and aims of mankind) said that Coxon was “correct” and gave the odds of a species-ending catastrophe as greater than 10 percent.

Even more remarkably, a few days after his departure Dario Amodei—Anthropic’s CEO—called for an industry-wide slowdown of AI research, to include both voluntary cooperation among tech firms and regulation by governments. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote in an essay given the strange title “We Must Pace the Frontier” (a nonsensical phrase, unless he wa...