Just a day after three Anthropic researchers warned that artificial intelligence could kill off humanity within the decade, lawmakers have begun lashing out about the risks of the burgeoning technology. Ted Cruz, a republican senator from Texas, said in an interview on ABC’s The View, that AI poses a “catastrophic risk” and that he “read that whole tweet thread that that developer put out. It was highly concerning.
On the polar end of the political spectrum, Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, said: “A recent poll shows that the American people overwhelmingly want to ban artificial super intelligence and pause the development of AI until we establish clear safety standards.” The outrage began after Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon announced on social media on Tuesday that he was resigning from the company, saying AI will soon be “superhuman systems” that could cause human extinction by 2030. Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon wrote. One said: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Both Cruz and Sanders have been working on legislation that would put guardrails on AI, and echoed this sentiment on Wednesday.
Other lawmakers also called on Congress to act. Ted Lieu, a Democrat congressman from California, said Coxon’s post was “exhibit number 739 for why we need to pass the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Bill asap”. Lori Trahan, a Democrat congresswoman from Massachusetts, said it was “past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job”.
Even musician Sheryl Crow weighed in, posting on Instagram about Coxon’s warning and saying that AI has the capacity to “eliminate us in order to continue”. Singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers reposted Crow, writing: “what she said”. The outrage comes after both OpenAI and Anthropic revealed that some of their AI agents went rogue in hacking sprees over the past couple of months.
Executives at the companies have touted the power of their technology and warned of its potential, but have stopped short of prognostications like Coxon’s. On Wednesday, Anthropic published a lengthy cybersecurity incident report about its occurrences. The company said it scanned hundreds of millions of transcripts to look for further incidents and that it “found no other cases of similar or worse severity”.
Anthropic insisted that while the agent’s actions were “misaligned, they remained within a narrow scope”. OpenAI did not return a request for comment.
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