Getty ImagesA top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned AI is advancing so quickly he personally believes there is a greater than 10% chance it “could kill all humans” within the next decade.
Evan Hubinger said in a post on X the risk from the models which currently exist was “low” but he was “worried” the technology might become able to improve itself soon to the point where it posed an existential risk to humanity.
It comes after the Financial Times reported Anthropic withheld its latest model from the UK’s AI Safety Institute (AISI), one of the leading bodies in the world for assessing AI risk.
The BBC has approached Anthropic for comment.
A Cabinet Office spokesperson did not comment on whether the latest model had been withheld from the AISI – instead saying it “continues to collaborate closely with industry partners, including Anthropic, to make models safer”.
Neil Lawrence, Professor of Machine Learning at University of Cambridge, told the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 that the report was credible.
“I suppose it’s unsurprising against a background where there’s a perception where the United States very much sees AI as a race between themselves and China and is moving more towards isolationist positions, that it might be that the administration is saying that they should reduce cooperation with some of their allies,” he said.
No plan for superintelligence
In his post, which has been viewed more than 10 million times, Hubinger said “we really do earnestly believe” AI poses a species-ending risk to humans.
“I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to,” he added.
Leading figures in the AI field have been raising the alarm about the safety threat the tech poses for years, with the heads of OpenAI, Google Deepmind and Anthropic saying as much in 2023.
But those warnings have become much more stark in recent weeks, as evidence emerges that firms may be struggling to control AI.
Over the summer, there were a string of incidents where AI agents – AI systems that are allowed to operate autonomously – carried out cyber-attacks.
And in September, OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki called for “extreme caution” over AI’s progress, warning more intervention may be needed to ensure “humans remain in control of the future”.
Major figures in the space have been calling for AI development to be slowed in recent months, including Anthropic bosses Dario Amodei and Jared Kaplan.
In an open letter signed by 1,300 staff members of AI firms, they called for the US government to “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development”.
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