Amodei called for independent auditors to check the companies for safety standards and urged global co-operation in creating rules around AI development.
The appeal for an industry-wide pause follows months of escalating concerns across the technology industry as AI model development has made significant strides. Tensions rose further after the leading AI labs discovered security breaches carried out by their own programs without their knowledge.
On Tuesday (local time), Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, resigned and posted a series of social media posts about how the leading AI labs were not responsibly developing the technology, setting off a furore.
Hours after Amodei published his essay, Altman posted a statement agreeing that a slowdown in AI development was necessary.
“This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks,” Altman wrote. “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”
Musk, in a post on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, said simply: “Dario is right.” And Hassabis wrote that Amodei’s essay was a step in the right direction “for meeting this critical moment”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Mike Isaac
Photographs by: Karsten Moran, The New York Times
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