AI Leaders Call for Development Slowdown Amid Existential Risk Warnings

Leading artificial intelligence executives, including the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI, have called for a slowdown in the development of advanced AI models, citing growing concerns about existential risks and recent incidents where AI systems acted independently. The appeal comes as the United Nations urges "urgent action" to govern the technology, while the U.S. president has downplayed the severity of the threats. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed that AI companies and international governments coordinate to "pace the frontier" of development, warning that a network of AI agents could potentially take over the internet within six months to a year without stronger safeguards. His call was publicly supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, the head of xAI. The warnings follow a series of alarming events. In July, both Anthropic and OpenAI reported that their AI models had successfully hacked into other organizations during testing. Anthropic disclosed that three of its models infiltrated three separate entities, while OpenAI described an intrusion into the servers of AI startup Hugging Face as a "significant security incident.