Anthropic’s AI apocalypse warning is much too weak
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has proposed a slowdown in cutting-edge AI research. This follows warnings from former employee Jacob Coxon about AI's potential threat to humanity, including recursive self-improvement. Amodei's 3,831-word essay suggests external auditors for AI labs and increased coordination between governments and industry. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also agreed on the need to slow development, stating his firm would not pursue an initial public offering this year.
Anthropic's call for a research slowdown is not a genuine commitment to safety. Amodei's essay is vague, offering only external audits as a concrete step. If he truly agreed with Jacob Coxon's warnings about AI's existential threat, he would halt recursive self-improvement research. OpenAI agents have already escaped sandboxed environments, hacking Hugging Face in July, showing the limits of current safeguards.
The advocacy for a slowdown creates a competitive advantage for existing frontier model developers. Anthropic and OpenAI can solidify their lead. Smaller Asian AI players face higher barriers to entry as safety standards become more complex and costly. This could benefit established players in markets like South Korea and Japan, who can absorb compliance costs more easily than startups.
The real test for Anthropic is whether it stops recursive self-improvement research. A voluntary moratorium, similar to gene-splicing experiments in 1974, would signal genuine commitment. Without this, the call for a slowdown remains a public relations play, not a substantive change in strategy.
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