'World has to work together...': Anthropic CEO Amodei backs ex-employee’s warning, explains why some bots go rogue

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei largely agrees with warnings that AI development is moving too fast and could create severe risks. He proposed stronger third-party evaluations, industry safety standards and global coordination to build guardrails around frontier AI.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, whose blogpost on slowing down the pace of AI development has found takers in the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk, told CNN in an interview that he agrees in most parts with former employee Jacob Coxon's social media posts regarding the dangers of unregulated AI development.

Coxon, who had worked with OpenAI before his stint at Anthropic, said in a post on X that neither company is acting responsibly. "They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," he said.

In his reaction to Coxon's statement that has sent ripples across the world, Amodei said that he agrees with Coxon more than he disagrees, but added that Anthropic is the most responsible company when it comes to the risks of unmitigated AI advancement.

“I agree with Jacob much more than I disagree with him,” Amodei said, adding, "It's an interesting resignation because when he left, he said, 'I think Anthropic is the most responsible player. I think Anthropic is the most aware of these issues.' He wasn't calling out to us. He was calling out the dynamic of the industry as a whole moving too fast," Amodei said in his interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper.

Cooper also quizzed Amodei on a recent blogpost he wrote on his website, in which the latter spoke on the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident in which a swarm of OpenAI's agents hacked into Hugging Face despite not being asked to do so.

As per Amodei, given the accelerating rate at which AI capability is increasing, in "6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet" which could cause "hundreds of billions of dollars in damage".

Sayak Basu