AI Leaders Call for Slower Development, but Nobody Can Say What a Slowdown Would Look Like

Warnings from AI's top bosses about existential threats are nothing new. But three years after the first AI safety summit at Bletchley Park, some of those same voices sound less certain about the real risks.

On Saturday, Anthropic head Dario Amodei urged the pace of development to be slowed. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk said they agreed. AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who quit Anthropic, told the BBC on Sunday that staff building these systems were "genuinely frightened" for humanity's future.

Yet a slowdown is far from simple. America is widely understood to fear losing the AI race to China. On Sunday, President Trump claimed the US was ahead and declared: "Whoever wins AI, wins." Everyone I speak to says that even if one company pauses, others will not, and it will simply be left behind.

Enforcement is another open question. Who would police it? Would we rely on companies to be transparent about what they are doing - and what they are choosing not to do? That would take a level of trust the tech sector has arguably never earned. Amodei proposed independent monitoring of AI models, industry-wide regulation and global regulation, but observers question how this works in practice.

"Nobody has given a substantive explanation of what 'slowdown' means," said Ed Zitron, CEO of EZ Primary Research. He said halting model training would leave firms vulnerable to Chinese rivals, with their products "captured in amber and distilled by Chinese labs."

The industry is burning through enormous money and resources while generating far less revenue, and reports suggest some adopters are disappointed. Economists speculate a "levelling" - a bursting bubble - is coming. Firms that survive could become the most powerful mega-corporations ever seen.

"No one can predict with certainty how this technology is going to evolve," said Alexander Voicu of UK AI company Synthesia, warning that rushing to regulate now could backfire.

Sasha Luccioni of Sustainable AI said: "I'm not worried about the existential risks of AI, I'm worried about the corporate greed of the companies that are creating it." Professor Dame Wendy Hall, who has advised the UN on AI, likened the situation to a farmer blaming a bull that escaped - when the fences were never strong enough.

Not everyone backs regulation. Parker Thayer of the Capital Research Centre argued on X for what he called regulating AI "into oblivion" - an extreme, unproven view, but one viewed nearly eight million times.

As Professor Hall put it: "Would you invest in a company that says it's going to bring about human extinction?"

Source: BBC News