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Anthropic disclosed that its Claude model is directing more than a quarter of the company's research and development efforts, completing most tasks end-to-end from high-level prompts under human oversight. The company said roughly 90% of its R&D work now involves some form of collaboration with Claude, though the model does not yet operate fully autonomously.
More than 100 AI researchers and safety evaluators, including Geoffrey Hinton and representatives from Johns Hopkins, Stanford and METR, signed a public letter urging foundation model developers to grant third-party testers genuine independence, transparency and legal protections. The letter, organized by the AI Evaluator Forum and shared exclusively with CNBC, follows Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's recent proposal to give some evaluators 'employee-like access' to inspect frontier models.
A Politico survey of over 2,000 adults found that about 66 percent believe there's at least a moderate chance advanced AI could destroy humanity, with 17 percent saying they're almost certain of it. The concern spans political lines, with 70 percent of Harris voters and 60 percent of Trump voters expressing similar fears, while only 22 percent see minimal risk.
At Salesforce's Dreamforce conference, executives from Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia debated AI safety and the pace of model development on stage, while many attendees said they were still struggling to fully adopt the AI tools already available. Nvidia's Jensen Huang urged labs to keep advancing quickly, even as an Anthropic researcher's resignation and warnings about safety from Amodei and Sam Altman fueled calls for a slower pace. Salesforce's Marc Benioff continued positioning his company as a beneficiary of AI rather than a casualty of it.
As alarm grows over AI-enabled bioweapons—fueled by Anthropic's report on misuse attempts of Claude and Stanford research on AI-designed viral genomes—some scientists argue the danger is overstated. David Bellamy of the Institute of Foundation Models says AI is not a fundamentally new threat, noting that the internet, translation tools, and open science journals already made dangerous biological information accessible long before large language models existed.
Anthropic published a blog outlining measurement standards for tracking AI development pace, revealing that its Claude chatbot now completes most tasks end-to-end from a high-level prompt with human supervision on 26 percent of the company's AI R&D work. The company also said AI performs at least large chunks of work under close human direction on more than 90 percent of its research, though it stressed Claude isn't fully autonomous on any measured task category. The disclosure came alongside proposals for tracking AI agent oversight and compute usage as ways to gauge how fast frontier AI development is progressing.
Anthropic released three metrics measuring AI-driven research progress, human oversight of AI agents, and internal compute allocation, publishing its methodology so other AI labs can adopt similar tracking. The move follows CEO Dario Amodei's weekend call for a coordinated industry slowdown, which drew support from leaders at OpenAI, SpaceX and Google DeepMind. One finding showed roughly 30,000 AI agents simultaneously performing research and engineering tasks on Anthropic's main internal platform.
Amid renewed debate over whether AI development should slow down for safety reasons—sparked by an Anthropic researcher's resignation and criticism of both Anthropic and OpenAI—commentary argues investors shouldn't react to individual statements from either side. Instead, the analysis suggests using game theory, the framework popularized by John Nash and dramatized in 'A Beautiful Mind,' to predict that AI spending will likely continue unabated due to competitive pressures, particularly U.S.-China rivalry.
Following Dario Amodei's essay urging slower AI development and international cooperation on safety guardrails, Mark Zuckerberg posted on X that Meta delayed its Muse AI model for months over safety concerns, but did so voluntarily rather than through any coordinated industry mandate. He argued that trust and alignment are becoming the key differentiators for AI products, suggesting market incentives alone will push companies toward safer deployment without government intervention.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp told CNBC that artificial intelligence needs enforceable guidelines and that companies should bear legal liability for harms caused by their AI systems. He went further, suggesting AI labs may need to be nationalized to shield clients from lawsuits tied to advanced AI's risks.
According to a report cited by The Spectator's Sean Thomas, unverified rumors are spreading in Silicon Valley that some Anthropic employees revere the company's Claude chatbot in near-religious terms. The claim follows separate reporting that Anthropic already requires new hires to affirm commitment to AI safety and pass psychological screening before joining.
A Pew Research survey of over 42,000 people across 37 countries, conducted between February and May, found that a majority in 34 nations believe AI will destroy more jobs than it creates over the next two decades. Concern is highest in wealthier nations such as Australia, South Korea, and the US, and most respondents also expect AI to widen the gap between rich and poor.