AI leaders would like to stop racing. Let’s make that possible.

Frontrunners in the race to build superintelligence say the field is moving dangerously fast.

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and co-writers argue that machines run by artificial intelligence may soon have the ability to enhance themselves with little or no human oversight, in a fashion that could rapidly get out of control. Echoing what experts have been saying for years, they say humanity needs to establish and retain “the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development.” In other words, we need an “off switch” for AI.

Competitor OpenAI also recently repeated its acknowledgement of a potential for catastrope. It expressed interest in global capacity for “coordinated action, including slowing frontier development when needed.”

In January, Google DeepMind’s Nobel-laureate CEO, Demis Hassabis, shared that he would go for a readiness to pause if everyone else would. Even Elon Musk, who signed a 2023 letter calling for a six-month pause, admitted in December that AI was the stuff of his nightmares, and that he would slow it down if he could.

If this is all marketing hype — most of it from companies with trillion-dollar initial public offerings on the line — it’s a heck of a bluff, and we should call them on it.

Three years ago, hundreds of experts, including several of the world’s most cited living scientists, warned that general-purpose AI systems threaten humanity with extinction. Last year, scientists and policymakers from all across the political spectrum called for a global ban on the development of artificial superintelligence — AI........

© The Hill