FEEBLE CALLS FOR SLOWING DOWN
The latest safety rallying cry in the US is the incredibly hollow phrase “pace the frontier”, a jargony proposal from Anthropic’s Dario Amodei that garnered a rare agreement from OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk. A statement supporting this concept has accumulated more than a thousand signatories from nearly all of Silicon Valley’s leading AI companies. But few seem to know what that actually means. If they’re legitimately concerned about self-improving AI ending humanity, vague calls for slowing down is a remarkably feeble response.
Still, it would be in these firms’ interest to spend less resources trying to build a machine God and more ensuring that their products aren’t being abused. They can’t unleash cyber weapons and then simultaneously sell defences. Rather than a supposed “pacing” of AI development on their own terms, policymakers must demand maximum transparency on the risks they’re seeing now, not disclosures months after an incident.
To his credit, Amodei himself supported this in his more than 3,800-word manifesto published after one of his employees quit and sounded the alarm that the people building AI believe it could “kill us all.” Regardless of any commitments they make, Amodei said: “The public deserves to know what is going on”. He’s correct.
Beijing and Washington might not be able to agree on a lot when it comes to AI governance. But the WeChat episode is a sign that cross-border risk sharing is possible. AI has already changed the internet and privacy as we know it. Imagine a cyberattack that exposed every private communication you’ve ever sent and the havoc that would unleash across businesses and communities. Creating channels for researchers and companies to share what they’re seeing and flag emerging threats will inherently tame some of the race dynamics and create an opening for the harder debates.
If the US and China can’t cooperate on the dangers already in view, there’s little hope they’ll manage the ones AI’s own builders warn could be the end of us all.
