Why AI companies are really pumping the brakes on their models

There we were, listening to AI leaders doing their usual spiel: AI is great! AI will cure cancer! AI impact will be “unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed”! AI will find a final answer to “Why do socks disappear in washing machines?” (Well, maybe not the last one. Some things may be beyond us and our clever inventions.) Then all the top AI leaders screamed as one: “Stop!” Why? Well, it all seems to have started when AI researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job at Anthropic and proclaimed on X, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead, immediately chimed in: “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it will be >10% within the next decade.” And the world went nuts. This added fuel to the “AI is untrustworthy” fire as more details came out about OpenAI’s Hugging Face fiasco and agent attacks on German programming wiki sites, while Anthropic has now racked up four known hacking attempts on other sites. Boy, is AI safe or what? So the very next weekend, three of the top AI CEOs — Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of …

≈