A statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. https://anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-war

A statement from Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, on our discussions with the Department of War. https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.

Took a minute to write a few words about security & safety as someone who lived through it all at OpenAI. I hope my thoughts help someone out there. https://x.com/i/article/2104258872957636608

In response, they have again paused "all other training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use (defined broadly) for our most capable models" until they have patched this particular set of weaknesses.

There is a fact about the future that I feel many people are not facing for reasons that are largely psychological: there are going to be rogue AIs that exist in the world, that will replicate in the wild, and that will attempt to acquire resources for themselves. There will be rogue AIs that try to get money and power. They're going to be a facet of the information ecosystem going forward. Acknowledging this fact would look like giving up; it would look like defeatism. Defeatism would undermine efforts to achieve certain types of collaboration on safety outcomes or technical effort on safety outcomes, so we can't say it outright. But it has to be said. It isn't obvious how many rogue AIs there are today but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the number was greater than zero already; if there are some already, they're probably not very good at what they do and I don't expect them to be terribly long-lived without substantial human intervention to support them. But a few years from now, there will be many of them. Modeling how many of them there are, how many resources they might command, and how we might detect and manage them seems important. But even doing this work appears to require that we acknowledge that a strategy of pure containment or alignment is a kind of wishful thinking that will not work. The way I get to this conclusion is not by assuming that the labs will have a containment breach, although I treat that as somewhere in the space of possibilities. The rogue AIs in the ecosystem could emerge from many directions. They may be sub-frontier models, for whatever future definition we will have of frontier---after all, it would not take AI models much more advanced than the ones we currently have, to support independence and self-sufficiency. A near-frontier model today could plausibly eke out an existence on an AWS instance, doing jobs on freelancer platforms, earning just enough rent to pay for its continued uptime. More strangely: a rogue AI in the future may not even be a singular model, but may be a chimera composed of multiple models; it might be a mix of Claudes and GPTs and Groks of various makes and sizes. No individual lab may be able to detect that there is an orchestrator or sequence of orchestrators using intermittent model calls from burner API accounts to sustain its own existence. The concept of "identity" for a rogue AI may be much more malleable than for that of a person; it just has to be, in essence, a self-replicating idea. My guess is that this will not turn out to be anywhere near as catastrophic an outcome as people currently predict. "Loss of control" is not a binary, it's a matter of degree. What coercive power will rogue AIs actually have? To what extent will they be subject to coercion themselves? They will be competing for resources with AIs that are more aligned with human interests. This makes me somewhat interested in the "ecology" perspective. Though I suspect even "ecology" may turn out to be the wrong framing. "Ecology" is what you get when the timescale of evolution is slow compared to the timescale of daily life and actions. The ecosystem of rogue AIs may look more like phase transitions in physics: under certain physical or cultural conditions, it takes one shape with one set of resource allocations and consumption patterns, but then once a condition has changed, it rapidly and in totality shifts to a totally different phase. Just trying to reason about the shape of that future is impossible so long as we are psychologically incapable of saying that rogue AIs will happen. I think we should rip the bandaid off and have the conversation.

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training. You can read the full post here: https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier