Anthropic founder calls for a ‘race to the top’ in AI safety
The co-founder of Amazon-backed artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has called for a “race to the top” in making AI safer as concerns grow over the potential risks associated with the technology.
“There should be a race to the top on safer AI, more ethical AI, in preparation for the fact that we believe there will be more powerful systems on the horizon,” Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief science officer of Anthropic, said.
“As AI systems effectively become more powerful, the risks become more serious. So it’s very important for us to get ahead of that.”
Kaplan made the comments at the Bloomberg Technology Summit today where leaders from across the tech sector and government came together to discuss AI.
He warned that as AI systems grow increasingly potent and capable of acting autonomously, they could be misused by companies, governments and individuals.
“It is possible to get around guardrails for Claude, ChatGPT, and basically every AI model out there,” he said. “It begs the question: ‘are these systems going to be controllable when they get that much more powerful?’.”
“I’m concerned and I think regulators should be as well,” he added.
Anthropic recently released a set of responsibility commitments that they say all their systems will adhere to.
The hope is that similar policies “will be embraced by other competitors and we’ll all be racing to develop technology that’s more reliable,” Kaplan said.
Anthropic’s chief executive will be attending the UK’s AI Safety Summit next week, held at Bletchley Park on the 1st and 2nd November.
Kaplan, who previously worked for OpenAI, said “a lot can be accomplished” at the summit but “the danger is the technology is moving so quickly it is very difficult to know what actions governments can take to improve AI.”
In September, Amazon said it is investing up to $4bn (£3.3bn) into Anthropic in exchange for partial ownership and the latter’s AI products, including its Claude chatbot, becoming part of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Bedrock service.