It’s Time to Investigate the AI Labs

Over the last several months, the two leading frontier AI labs have shown some brazen behavior. It started with a series of​ carefully planned announcements​ and reports from OpenAI that try to establish how unnerving and powerful (not to mention ​felonious​) their LLM-powered agent systems have become. They then handed the baton to Anthropic, whose employees began ​publicly debating​ the exact probability that these technologies would lead to human extinction. They delivered this all with an eerie calmness that conveyed a nihilistic inevitability about their work. The ground suitably softened, the campaign crescendoed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodi releasing a letter, titled ​“We Must Pace the Frontier,”​ in which he enumerates all the harms his own company’s research might cause, and then, instead of apologizing and promising to stop, concludes that catastrophe can only be avoided if we “build the technology in the right way,” which involves – surprise, surprise – the government…