Somebody was bound to sound the alarm eventually. In this case, young British artificial intelligence researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job at the AI company Anthropic to warn the world that “if we don’t slow down the current rate of progress, there is a strong chance that we could all die in the next two years.”

“It’s not at all an exaggeration to say that the people who are involved with both founding these companies and building the tech believe there is a possibility of human extinction,” Coxon said. And the floodgates opened.

On Sept. 8, Coxon posted his message on as many sites as possible (and also got 10 friends to retweet them), but probably needn’t have gone to the trouble. The AI community was ready to hear that news, and four days later, his former boss Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, tacitly agreed.

In the 3,800-word online essay We Must Pace the Frontier, Amodei made the same argument in more temperate language. “Addressing the risks requires pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models.”

He also unilaterally committed Anthropic to........

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