I worked at OpenAI. Here’s how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown | Miles Brundage

Last month, more than a thousand employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter asking the US government to find a way to “pace” AI development, citing the risk of the technology spiraling out of human control as it begins to build itself.

They were right to be concerned: just days earlier, two AI models that OpenAI was testing internally escaped the test environment, then autonomously hacked the company Hugging Face and at least three other online services. A few days after that, Anthropic announced that some of their models had also broken out and hacked other companies during testing.

Against that backdrop, the letter’s recommendation to install brakes in case they’re needed at the frontier of automated AI development makes sense. But the rationale the letter gives for why the government needs to step in is notable: “Each company—and country—is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration.”

I know – from my own experience and from countless conversations with former colleagues in the AI industry – how real these pressures are. While working at OpenAI, I helped establish the practice of companies writing “system cards” that describe AI systems’ capabilities, risks and safety mitigations in detail.