OpenAI boss and Elon Musk back calls to put brakes on ‘reckless’ AI development

Sam Altman and Elon Musk have backed a call from the head of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, to “slow the pace” of AI development after he warned that an AI swarm could otherwise become capable of “taking over the entire internet” within a year.

In a rare show of unity, the rival technology leaders threw their weight behind the appeal from the founder and chief executive of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, which came after a series of warnings from AI researchers last week.

In an essay, Amodei laid out his thoughts on “why the AI industry should slow down”, with a three-part plan for doing so, starting with giving independent monitors constant access to developers’ research processes. Amodei said “building [AI] too fast is reckless” and he feared that after hundreds of OpenAI agents hacked into the Hugging Face website this summer, a swarm with greater capabilities but similarly misaligned could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage by “taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet”. This was disputed by some AI experts as not particularly plausible and to be treated with scepticism.

Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, responded to Amodei’s slowdown plan with a post on X: “Dario is right.”