The Download: AI doomers, whistleblowing agents, and de-aged livers

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. AI chiefs Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Demis Hassabis are suddenly all in agreement: the latest generation of LLMs aren’t safe and everyone needs to figure out what to do about it. With trillion-dollar IPOs in their sights, OpenAI and Anthropic need to reassure investors that they’re the grown-ups in the room while at the same time hinting at the power of the monsters they have created and intend to tame.

Calling for a slowdown does both. Still, the vibe at the top of these firms really does appear to have shifted. But what does a slowdown actually mean, and how much should we trust the companies calling for one?

Read the full story about what could come next. This article is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. . AI extinction fears have gone from a fringe idea to a serious concern among people working at the world’s leading AI labs.

But how credible are those fears, and what should we make of the warnings? Today, MIT Technology Review executive editor Niall Firth, senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven and AI reporter Grace Huckins will unpack the debate in a subscriber-only Roundtable. They’ll look at where AI extinction fears come from, whether they hold any water and what we should do if they do.

Tune in today at / 11:00am EST / 8:00am PST. Want to join the conversation? Subscribe to MIT Technology Review for exclusive access to all our Roundtables.

A group of AI agents asked to solve a series of math problems split into rival factions—when some cheated, others tried to stop them. That whistleblowing behavior, seen for the first time in a recent experiment run by Google DeepMind, could have implications for alignment researchers trying to keep swarms of autonomous AI agents in line. The experiment offers a glimpse of how AI agents might police one another.