Sam Altman Floats Industrywide Pause Amid AI Safety Concerns
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees in a company-wide meeting that the firm is considering slowing down its development of cutting-edge artificial intelligence, Bloomberg reported Friday (Sept. 11), citing unnamed sources.
Altman said that he hopes other AI labs will join OpenAI in the slowdown, but that some may not do so, according to the report.
OpenAI did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
OpenAI said Sept. 1 that it delayed the development and launch of its Astra model as it bolstered and tested safeguards against “cyber misuse and unauthorized model actions.”
The company said that after testing Astra’s capabilities, it determined that the model was the first to meet its “Critical” cybersecurity threshold, “meaning that with the right tools and access, it can find previously unknown security flaws and develop ways to exploit them across many well-protected systems without a person guiding each step.”
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OpenAI had said Aug. 7 that it was pausing internal activity related to Astra due to security concerns.
Anthropic suggested in June that frontier AI developers should slow or pause their efforts and give societal structures and alignment research time to keep up with the advancing technology.
Anthropic Institute Lead Marina Favaro and Anthropic Co-Founder Jack Clark wrote in a June 4 blog post that the Anthropic Institute would organize conversations with other AI companies as well as policymakers, researchers and civil society to address concerns about the technology and create methods of coordination.
Anthropic’s proposal for a pause was sparked by the growing share of AI development that is being delegated to AI systems, and the potential that an AI system could fully autonomously design and develop another AI system, Favaro and Clark wrote.
In July, a statement signed by 1,132 employees of frontier AI companies called on the U.S. government to support an international effort to “deliberately pace” the frontier of automated AI development.
The statement said that as the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies near the ability to automate AI research, there is a risk that they could lose control of the resulting systems.
As of Friday, the page hosting the statement said the number of signers had risen to 1,386.
