OpenAI made headlines in July when it revealed that some of its most advanced AI models went rogue and hacked Hugging Face, one of the world’s largest hubs for sharing AI models, after it lost control of them during a security test.
Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf said at the time that the incident was “a wake-up call” for the industry.
Since then, the debate over AI safety concerns has escalated with AI researchers, technology industry executives and politicians weighing in.
Last week, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who left OpenAI rival Anthropic over concerns the tech could wipe out humanity, wrote about his resignation in a post that cited the dangers of AI and later went viral against the backdrop of growing safety concerns.
In response, Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger said he thought the possibility of AI causing human extinction “within the next decade” was more than 10%.
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark later told the BBC that a “kill switch” controlled by a third party may need to be mandatory for the industry.
Meanwhile, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei called for the pace of AI development to slow and be more closely monitored, as the company has done before, though some have questioned the motivations behind this.
Amodei also said that any action to rein in AI should be done “without sacrificing commercial advantage”.
But US President Donald Trump has said fears about the safety of AI are a “hoax” and criticised calls to have more guardrails in place for the fast-moving technology.
In a series of social media posts, the US president compared warnings about AI to the “Global Warming Scam” which, he said, was “being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats”.
Trump also called himself “the Hoax Buster”, likening concerns about the safety of the technology to what he called “the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX”.
The only “guardrails” needed for AI was a “strong and smart” president, said Trump.
