(The Epoch Times)—Artificial intelligence (AI) giant Anthropic on June 4 called for industry leaders worldwide to slow down the development pace of the technology, warning that the models are reaching a point at which they could soon independently improve themselves, potentially taking control out of the hands of humanity.
Anthropic, maker of the popular Claude chatbot, stated in a blog post that continuing to delegate the development of AI to the systems themselves risks creating a technology that is “capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor.”
“This is called recursive self-improvement,” Anthropic’s Marina Favaro and Jack Clark wrote in the post. “We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.”
Anthropic had warned of a potential cybersecurity reckoning from frontier AI models when announcing its Claude Mythos Preview in April.
Some industry leaders have highlighted the risks of AI’s arrival at the point of improving itself without human intervention, warning of the potentially untold effects on society.
“We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology,” Favaro and Clark wrote.
“The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require.”
Anthropic said developing these systems would enable frontier AI developers to “verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret.”
This process would require global coordination throughout “multiple well-resourced labs at or near the frontier,” Anthropic stated.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on June 2 asking AI companies to voluntarily submit their frontier models for government review 30 days before a full public release.
It’s not yet clear which AI firms will choose to participate, but the order comes after the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation inked deals with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI last month to evaluate their frontier models for security risks ahead of public releases.
Anthropic is also trying to go public. The AI firm announced on June 1 that it had confidentially filed an initial public offering prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
OpenAI has indicated it may soon follow suit.
