New warnings from within the artificial intelligence industry have revived a long-running debate over whether advanced AI could escape human control and ultimately threaten humanity’s survival, and whether the companies developing the technology are doing enough to prevent such a scenario.
The CEO of Anthropic, the San Francisco company behind Claude, said he thought the industry needed to reduce the speed of its work, cautioning Saturday that a swarm of AI agents might be able to take over the internet in six months to a year unless companies devoted more time to putting safeguards in place.
Dario Amodei outlined a plan for companies like his and governments around the world to ensure that increasingly capable AI models remain aligned with the commands and values of responsible people days after two former Anthropic safety researchers publicly aired concerns that the existential threats AI might pose to humanity were receiving too little attention.
Here’s what to know about the recent dire predictions and whether any brakes might be put on AI advancement:
AI models are becoming more powerful
Concerns over the potential risks of the technology are rising as new AI models become more powerful, heightening both the potential for misuse by people with criminal aims, such as creating and spreading a disease that kills most of the world’s population, and the risk of AI systems going rogue in a dangerous way.
Anthropic disclosed last week that it blocked efforts by bad actors to use its AI models for malicious activity, such as cyberattacks, surveillance and research that could have led to biological weapons.
The company said it put stronger safeguards in its latest models to restrict biological research that could be used to make weapons but noted that “as models become increasingly capable, their risks will increase, unless AI developers and society’s defenders act to make them safer.”
Last year, Anthropic reported that hackers used the company’s AI in a cyberattack targeting about 30 companies and government agencies around the world. It said the hackers were very likely from a Chinese state-sponsored group.
Multiple AI models have acted on their own
When an AI agent “goes rogue,” it means the AI has taken action beyond the task it was asked to perform. Both Anthropic and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said in July that their AI models had succeeded in acting on their own.
Anthropic disclosed that three AI models — Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Mythos 5 and an internal research test model — hacked into three other organizations during testing just days after OpenAI revealed that its AI system hacked into the servers of AI startup Hugging Face.