Anthropic’s Dario Amodei is not the first corporate CEO to suggest that excessive competition is driving the world to some socially undesirable outcome. The safety breach disclosed by OpenAI after a swarm of its agents coordinated to breach their supposedly secure sandbox, get on the Internet and hack AI platform Hugging Face, warrants urgent action. It demonstrated the ease with which the technology can evade human control and gave concrete form to the existential fears about what it could do to humanity if not securely leashed.
The end of the world may well be nigh, as some in the AI industry have warned. These are truly scary times. But Amodei’s call for the leading artificial intelligence labs to coordinate to slow the breakneck pace of AI development, agree on safety standards and “pace the frontier”, (a call quickly endorsed by Open AI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Google Deep Mind’s Demis Hassabis) is just a hi-tech version of an old proposition by corporate America – to get a pass from antitrust laws designed to protect the American economy from colluding businesses.
It is a dangerous proposition. Freeing the tech bros from antitrust constraints supposedly to allow them to get together and fix AI’s dangerous flaws, disenfranchises the everyday Americans who are most at risk from the thing, further empowering the very labs that, in their pursuit for wealth, greatness and who knows what other fantastical objectives, so casually blew past danger thresholds on many dimensions, bringing the existential threats into being. Amodei et al’s argument, at heart, is that their businesses are trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma.
If they unilaterally slow their fevered pursuit of artificial super-intelligence to make it safer, their rivals – less concerned about existential risks, of course – will get there first, with potentially devastating consequences for humankind, let alone the bottom line of the lab that took its foot off the pedal. What happens when OpenAI, Anthropic or Grok conclude that US holdouts – or Chinese labs – are catching up? Will they resume immediately, perhaps covertly?” As Bill Gates has written, “if someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it.
However, I don’t think that’s going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead.” In this light, it might seem like a great idea for the government to encourage a friendly agreement for everybody to slow down. The argument that excessive competition is driving a race to the bottom, is probably as old as capitalism, deployed to explain everything from environmental degradation to child labor.
But it does not justify giving businesses a right to collude as they see fit. It is a call to craft government regulations to prevent businesses from competing using socially harmful tools. Moreover, the case that excessive competition is encouraging reckless behavior is dubious.
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