GoKawiilis a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Dario Amodei kicked off a flood of statements over the past few days about AI safety by publishing a long essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier” detailing why AI development should be slowed down. Other AI leaders and politicians are speaking out in favor of or opposing his points, and we’ve compiled some of them here.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
Amodei’s Saturday morning essay outlined three steps for pacing AI development: embedded third-party evaluators that can verify if a company is adhering to safety practices and commitments and report incidents, coordination between frontier AI companies in democratic countries on standards and limits, and global coordination between democratic governments and authoritarian governments on pacing AI development “to the extent this is possible.” Amodei said Anthropic is “unilaterally committing to the first of these steps.”
However, Amodei noted that pacing “does not mean halting model training or technical progress, ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Altman said shortly after Amodei posted about his essay on X. “This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.” Altman also committed to having independent evaluators at the company, calling it a “great idea.”
On Sunday, Altman said OpenAI welcomes “a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI.” He added that OpenAI hopes other companies “learn from our approaches and propose their own; we think shared standards for misalignment, monitoring, and safety will lead to better outcomes.” Like Amodei, Altman also said that “When we talk about “pacing”, we do not mean “stopping”, noting that progress should be “slower than it otherwise could be.”
Altman also noted two ways that he thinks AI progress “could go very badly”: losing “control of the future to AI” and ending up “in a world with too much concentration of power,” which he said can be avoided by “walking a narrow middle path.”
Google DeepMind co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis
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