Dario Amodei: "We Must Pace The Frontier"

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Along with my co-founders and employees, I have grappled with this duality of risk and benefit since the beginning of Anthropic. Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers, while building it too fast is reckless. We have sought a middle way: to show that it’s possible to build carefully and succeed commercially, and to make safety something on which AI companies compete. In other words, to create a race to the top. We have always devoted a substantial fraction of our efforts to studying, addressing, and informing the public about these AI risks, as well as advocating for well-considered regulation of AI, even when this gets us accused of hype, “doomerism”, or regulatory capture. We have tried to prioritize caution over speed and prudence over profit.

But over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain. Two things have convinced me.