Image source, Getty ImagesAnthropic makes the AI tool Claude, which is used as a chatbot and as a tool to help coding
ByTom GerkenTechnology reporter
A top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned AI is advancing so quickly he 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, external the risk from the models which currently exist was “low” but he was “worried” the technology might develop and improve itself soon to the point where it posed an existential risk to humanity.
He did not spell out how he thought AI systems could in future result in humans being wiped out.
But his comments are the latest in a series of increasingly stark warnings about AI, with the debate shifting from whether it truly poses a risk to how big that risk is.
Hubinger’s intervention was in response to another post on X, external from Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who has just quit Anthropic and previously worked at OpenAI.
“Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote.
“These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”
OpenAI has been approached for comment.
Dame Wendy Hall, a computer scientist who advises the UN on AI, told the BBC she was “shocked” by Hubinger and Coxon’s social media posts.
She told the World at One on BBC Radio Four some of it could be “PR and marketing” however, as Anthropic and OpenAI raced towards highly anticipated stock market debuts.
But she added: “Why would someone want to say that? I would plead with investors not to invest in this company if that is their value system.”
Separately, the Financial Times reported, external 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.
Anthropic has declined to comment on the posts by its employees or the situation with the AISI.
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”.
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.
Hubinger works in AI alignment, which aims to build human ethical ideas and principles into the technology. In other words, it aims to keep it on track with what humans value.
Many leading researchers say those attempts appear to be failing, as demonstrated by a string of incidents this summer where AI agents – AI systems that are allowed to operate autonomously – carried out cyber-attacks.
OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all disclosed hacks carried out by their AI tools.
In Anthropic’s safety report from August, external, it wrote there was a low risk of its models becoming misaligned with a hypothetical powerful organisation’s desires, causing it to exploit or tamper with its systems.
It also said there was a similarly low risk of highly capable AI being able to “perform automated research and development” which could cause “catastrophic harm initiated by the AI”. But it said it was “less confident in this assessment” than it was previously.
“We are seeing early signs of potential acceleration,” it wrote.
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.
Earlier this month, 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, external, 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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