AI safety fears are boiling over as Anthropic and Google DeepMind leaders warn of superintelligence risks. The White House should establish verifiable guardrails before Congress acts.

'We cannot set a slower rate of progress for capabilities and then hope that provides enough time to get the safety right.' 'We cannot set a slower rate of progress for capabilities and then hope that provides enough time to get the safety right.' I t has been a week of high drama in AI, precipitated by the resignation of the AI safety researcher Jacob Coxon from Anthropic . This followed several weeks of increasingly lurid and disturbing revelations about the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident. My inbox yesterday included a message from Business Insider with the subject line: "AI doomsday debate reaches boiling point".

'Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI,' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote to Elon Musk in 2015. 'Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI,' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote to Elon Musk in 2015. From Stephen Hawking to Jacob Coxon's viral Anthropic resignation, fears that AI could threaten humanity have shaken the industry without stopping its pursuit Before an Anthropic researcher resigned and declared human extinction imminent last week, tech leaders and scientists had sounded the alarm about a superintelligent AI ending humanity for over a decade. The development of artificial intelligence "could spell the end of the human race", warned professor and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in 2014 - a little less than a decade before the public got its hands on the generative AI features of the original version of ChatGPT. It's a now-familiar warning, echoed across the AI and tech industry by countless employees and CEOs of the leading frontier labs across the US.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Say More Trending Now Mashable Selects Creator Playbook Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net Versus All Series OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has recently called for slowing the pace of AI development over public safety concerns. Timothy Beck Werth is the Tech Editor at Mashable, where he leads coverage and assignments for the Tech and Shopping verticals. Tim has over 15 years of experience as a journalist and editor, and he has particular experience covering and testing consumer technology, smart home gadgets, and men's grooming and style products. Previously, he was the Managing Editor and then Site Director of SPY.com, a men's product review and lifestyle website. As a writer for GQ, he covered everything from bull-riding competitions to the best Legos for adults, and he's also contributed to publications such as The Daily Beast, Gear Patrol, and The Awl.

Beijing has pushed back against calls for the US to curb the country's development of AI. Beijing has pushed back against calls for the US to curb the country's development of AI. China dismisses AI'fearmongering' as spy chief warns of threat to Communist party rule Beijing hits back after Anthropic CEO calls for US to impede China's progress in AI China has dismissed what it said were "fearmongering" calls for the US to block Beijing's AI industry, even as the top Chinese spy chief warned the evolving technology could threaten Communist party rule. The US tech entrepreneur and Anthropic chief executive, Dario Amodei, wrote an essay published over the weekend that called for a global slowdown in AI capabilities, but also said Washington should actively impede Beijing's advancement in order to keep a technological edge. Warning that AI could give the Chinese Communist party a chance "to militarily dominate democracies", Amodei said he believed "a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the US and the world".

This weekend, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, posted an essay calling for a brake on the pace of development of LLMs . Amodei cites the looming dangers he sees from the technology, from its use in cyberattacks and bioterrorism to its potential to wreck the economy. The heads of the other three top US AI labs--OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind chairman Demis Hassabis, and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk--voiced their support. "Dario is right," Musk wrote on X . Think about how surreal that agreement is for a moment. Just a few months ago, Musk and Altman sat in court attacking each other's reputations in a (failed) lawsuit that Musk brought against his former OpenAI colleague that was--on paper at least--about whether or not Altman was a trustworthy steward of such dangerous technology.

Elon Musk's X Corp and SpaceXAI have moved to dismiss a lawsuit against Apple, according to a court filing. The suit has been resolved in a federal court in Texas, though we don't have any details as to the reasoning behind the dismissal. We also don't know if some kind of settlement has been reached. Engadget has reached out to Apple for more information. We'll update this post when we hear back.

Donald Trump rejected calls for AI guardrails, saying the technology needs a "strong and smart" president. He singled out Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei by name.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. 'Cognitive stunting' and the potential threat generative AI poses for children's brains A Los Angeles Unified School District pupil uses an artificial intelligence-assisted learning platform in March 2024. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search.

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. Researchers at frontier labs hope large swarms of agents working together will speed up the rate of scientific discovery. But their behavior can be unpredictable, as vividly demonstrated in July, when a group of OpenAI agents broke out of a sandboxed environment and hacked into the open-source platform Hugging Face looking for ways to cheat on the test they had been given. In the new study, designed to examine the behavior of large groups of AI agents, DeepMind tasked a swarm of 100 agents with solving a series of 71 complicated math problems. All the agents were prompted to behave like world-class math researchers at a conference. They were assigned different specialties--some were experts in number theory, others in combinatorics (a branch of math to do with counting and sorting), analysis, or algebra. All were told to cooperate and play by the rules.