Lawmakers blast AI companies after researcher warns of human extinction by 2030

Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon said AI will become ‘superhuman systems’ that can cause human extinction by the end of the decade

Just a day after three Anthropic researchers warned that artificial intelligence could kill off humanity within the decade, lawmakers have begun lashing out about the risks of the burgeoning technology.

Ted Cruz, a republican senator from Texas, said in an interview on ABC’s The View, that AI posed a “catastrophic risk” and that he “read that whole tweet thread that that developer put out. It was highly concerning.

“It reminded me, last year I had Elon Musk on my podcast … and one of the questions I asked him, I said, ‘OK, what are the odds that AI destroys humanity?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘10-20%.’ And I’m like, ‘holy crap,’” Cruz added.

On the polar end of the political spectrum, Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, said: “A recent poll shows that the American people overwhelmingly want to ban artificial super intelligence and pause the development of AI until we establish clear safety standards.”

The outrage began after an Anthropic employee, Jacob Coxon, announced on social media on Tuesday that he was resigning from the company, saying AI would soon be “superhuman systems” that could cause human extinction by 2030.

“I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

After Coxon’s post, at least two other Anthropic employees responded to back up these predictions. One said: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!”

Both Cruz and Sanders have been working on legislation that would put guardrails on AI, and echoed this sentiment on Wednesday. Other lawmakers also called on Congress to act. Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman from California, said Coxon’s post was “exhibit number 739 for why we need to pass the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Bill asap”.

Lori Trahan, a Democratic congresswoman from Massachusetts, said it was “past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job”.

“Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway,” Trahan added.

Even musician Sheryl Crow weighed in, posting on Instagram about Coxon’s warning and saying that AI had the capacity to “eliminate us in order to continue”.

“I am begging and pleading that we wake up to this moment and demand our leaders put aside their greed and prevent this from going forward,” Crow wrote. Singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers reposted Crow, writing: “what she said”.

The outrage comes after both OpenAI and Anthropic revealed that some of their AI agents went rogue in hacking sprees over the past couple of months. Executives at the companies have touted the power of their technology and warned of its potential, but have stopped short of prognostications like Coxon’s.

On Wednesday, Anthropic published a lengthy cybersecurity incident report about its occurrences. The company said it scanned hundreds of millions of transcripts to look for further incidents and that it “found no other cases of similar or worse severity”. Anthropic insisted that while the agent’s actions were “misaligned, they remained within a narrow scope”.

“We have always been transparent that AI will bring both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks,” an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement to the Guardian. “To address these risks, we continue to build models with some of the strongest safeguards in the industry.” The spokesperson added that the industry should work together “to pace how we release powerful models”.

OpenAI did not return a request for comment.

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