An AI researcher who quit Anthropic has told the BBC that people working on the technology were “genuinely frightened” about the speed of its advancements and what it could mean for humanity.
Jacob Coxon spoke to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Saturday about his viral resignation post in which he raised concerns about out-of-control artificial intelligence.
“I believe that if we don’t slow down at the current rate of progress, there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future,” he said.
His resignation comes amid growing safety concerns in the industry, including from his former boss, Anthropic head Dario Amodei, who in an essay argued for development to slow down.
The 27-year-old Coxon – who worked at OpenAI before joining Anthropic – welcomed the suggestion of a slowdown from Amodei but said it would need to be co-ordinated with China.
“The people who work at these companies are completely serious when they ask for regulation because they find themselves trapped in a race. And they’re scared of the outcomes of that race,” he told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.
“Sam Altman and Elon Musk have agreed that this is a great idea. But I think there’ll need to be some sort of co-ordinated slowdown with China if we’re going to avoid a race at an international scale.”
The hardest question to answer, according to Coxon, was what an AI apocalypse would look like.
One of the risks outlined in Amodei’s comments was of a swarm of bots acting like a supercomputer that could take over the internet.
Coxon said this scenario could be realistic in six months to a year.
In response to Coxon’s departure, an Anthropic spokesperson told BBC News: “We have always been transparent that AI will bring both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks.
“To address these risks, we continue to build models with some of the strongest safeguards in the industry.”
The firm has been a pioneer in studying how AI models work, the spokesperson added. It was the first to publish a framework for mitigating the risks posed by their development – and it also “aggressively” tests its models and publishes the findings to aid scrutiny and prevent incidents of “AI misalignment”.
“This work is also why we believe the world would benefit from the industry adopting a lawful, verifiable way to work together to pace how we release powerful models,” they said.
In Amodei’s essay, called We Must Pace the Frontier and published on Saturday, he proposed a three-point plan that included independent monitoring of AI models as they are developed, industry-wide regulation and global regulation.
