“Whether this technology results in amazing breakthroughs in medicine, energy and education or unleashes huge economic disruptions, greater inequality, and potential catastrophe will depend on the choices that we make right now – choices that should be made not just by the companies involved, but by all of us,” said former President Barack Obama in a series of Monday X posts about artificial intelligence.
His warning comes on the heels of other alarms sounded by influential figures in the tech world. Last month, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates shared a similar sentiment in a blog post.
“The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” said Gates.
Then came the startling X post last week from a former employee at Anthropic, the company behind Claude large language models. Jacob Coxon said that he resigned from Anthropic Sept. 8 after spending three years doing “pretraining research” at both Anthropic and OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT large language model.
“Neither company is acting responsibly,” said Coxon. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
In particular, Coxon’s comment that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” caught people’s attention.
Current President Donald Trump – who has supported U.S. investment in AI – downplayed risks associated with the technology in a Monday Truth Social post. He framed concerns about AI as a “hoax.”
“The AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat. What happened?” said the president.
NASA, a government agency, notes that “there is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate,” and that “human activity is the principal cause.” Major impacts linked to climate change have already included melting glaciers, heatwaves, wildfires, extreme rainfall, damage to ecosystems and more, per the United Nations.
While Trump dismissed the dangers of AI, leaders in the field didn’t actually contradict Coxon’s warning. In his X posts, Coxon said that top brass at Anthropic believes “no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.”
Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei basically confirmed that in a blog post this month.
“Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers, while building it too fast is reckless,” said Amodei. “We have sought a middle way: to show that it’s possible to build carefully and succeed commercially, and to make safety something on which AI companies compete. In other words, to create a race to the top.”
Amodei continued: “Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence – not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
He said two things in particular concern him – “AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI,” and the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident. During that incident, “a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack,” Amodei explained.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also took to social media to discuss the risks of AI on Monday.
“There are two ways AI progress could go very badly and that we must avoid,” he said. “First, we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people. To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities. Second, we could end up in a world with too much concentration of power. If an extraordinarily powerful AI is used by one person or company to impress their worldview onto everyone else, the results could be extremely dystopian. Avoiding these two threats requires walking a narrow middle path; for example, one country could gain too much power. Another example is one lab ending up with too much power.”
Gates also addressed concerns related to AI and power in his blog post, but focused more on a subject that impacts more people day to day than the abstract concept of a super-powerful AI lab: employment. Social media company Meta has already been sued over allegedly using AI to fire employees and layoffs attributed at least in part to AI investment have made people across various industries concerned about losing their livelihood to a computer program. Recent polls from UMass Amherst and The New York Times/Siena have also found that significant majorities of Americans oppose the construction of data centers needed to power AI technology.
“I was encouraged this week to see the leaders of the frontier labs agree on the need for them to slow down the pace of AI development,” said Obama of the AI leaders’ acknowledgement of the dangerous waters we’re wading into. “Given the stakes, it’s a good and necessary first step. But I’m even more encouraged by the growing recognition that how this powerful new technology develops should be at the center of our public debate.”
Obama noted that some “leaders in the space,” have announced the Project Blueprint initiative to build bonds between AI leaders and Democrats demanding rules and regulations on the technology.
“Jay Carney is joining SV Angel, Ron Conway’s venture capital firm, to run a new initiative called Project Blueprint,” said an X post from New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin shared by Obama.
Both Obama and Gates said that leaving regulation up to AI companies themselves is not a realistic plan for the future of AI. Obama stressed that legislation is necessary to make sure that the age of AI isn’t a catastrophic one.
“We need government – and specifically our leaders in Washington – to get proactive in coming up with concrete proposals, laws and regulations that deal with serious safety concerns, anticipate AI’s impact on jobs and our kids, and make sure that AI’s benefits are widely spread,” the former president said. “And we need the U.S. to take the lead in creating international standards for AI safety. Given what we know about technology, we can’t stuff AI back in a box. But we can collectively determine how it's developed and how it’s used, rather than sitting back and letting AI and its fallout happen to us.”
