Sarah Heck, head of public policy at Anthropic, said she doesn’t believe artificial intelligence companies can address surveillance and safety concerns by following an “honor code.”
“We want to work with the government to figure out what makes sense,” Heck said Wednesday at the Politico Decode Summit in Washington. “We can’t check our own homework, that’s very obvious.”
Heck’s comments come just days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei rocked the tech world by calling on the industry to intentionally slow down the pace of model development. Amodei on Saturday proposed a three-step plan to slow the rate of improvement in model capabilities “without sacrificing commercial advantage or America’s lead in AI.”
Industry executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind Chairman Demis Hassabis, were quick to voice support for Amodei’s proposal, which was announced last week after industry researchers sounded the alarm about AI’s potential to cause catastrophic harm.
“Dario is right,” Musk wrote in a post to X on Saturday.
Other technology leaders, including: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t see much need to intentionally slow down development.
During the keynote speech at sales force At the annual Dreamforce conference on Tuesday, Huang said the industry doesn’t need new laws or regulations. He added that speed and safety are not mutually exclusive, but companies should pick up the pace until they can reliably release products that are ready for launch.
Zuckerberg echoed Huang’s comments on Tuesday, saying Meta had delayed the release of Muse, its personal AI agent, for several months “to focus on safety and security.”
“We didn’t call on everyone else to do this before we did it. We just did it as part of our daily routine because it was clearly the right thing to do for people and for us,” Zuckerberg said in a post on X.
Heck said Wednesday that Anthropic consults with the White House “every day” and that the company works with Congress “all year long.” She said Anthropic strives to ask “tough questions now.”
“If we don’t start thinking about some of the tough things now, like how we deal with China, how we regulate AI, how we continue to advance our own security measures, it may be too late,” Heck said.
Spotlight: Why AI Labs Demands Slowdown
