Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Anthropic's CEO Drew Up the AI Brake, Altman, Musk and Hassabis Signed On Within a Day, and the Speaker of the House Says Enforcing It Is the Labs' Job, Not Congress's

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Anthropic's CEO Drew Up the AI Brake, Altman, Musk and Hassabis Signed On Within a Day, and the Speaker of the House Says Enforcing It Is the Labs' Job, Not Congress's · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the drivers wrote the speed limit and the police chief went home. The New York Times reported on Saturday that Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei, published a nearly four-thousand-word essay asking the AI industry to slow down.
• 0:16
  [Guest] By Sunday night the answers were in. Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Google's Demis Hassabis backed it within a day, then the Speaker of the House said on television that Congress will not be the one to make any of it stick.
• 0:30
  [Host] We covered this on Saturday, when Sam Altman told his staff OpenAI would slow down if the other labs did too. So Amodei just took him up on it?
• 0:40
  [Guest] He wrote the terms. The essay's line in bold is that we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models, with a three-step plan Anthropic says it is starting alone.
• 0:53
  [Host] A post on X costs a CEO nothing. What is actually in the plan?
• 0:57
  [Guest] Step one is the concrete part. Anthropic will give outside safety testers desks in its offices, access badges and company laptops, and the right to publish what they find without Anthropic editing it.
• 1:09
  [Host] Why does he think this is urgent enough for four thousand words?
• 1:13
  [Guest] Two reasons. Since the summer AI has been building the next generation of AI, and he says it is moving drastically faster. And this summer's escape by OpenAI's agents convinced him a more capable swarm could take over the entire internet inside a year, a permanent army of hijacked computers doing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.
• 1:33
  [Host] Inside a year, and an army of hijacked computers would include mine. Then why is Musk, of all people, agreeing with him?
• 1:41
  [Guest] Musk spent years attacking Anthropic, until his SpaceX started selling it computing at more than a billion dollars a month, according to filings CNBC cites. His post said Dario is right that there should be some oversight, and that peer review of AI by competitors is the right way to start.
• 1:59
  [Host] Peer review by competitors. So the other drivers write your ticket?
• 2:03
  [Guest] That is step two. Amodei wants the top labs to agree on capability checkpoints. His own example: a model that can break out of the box it is tested in does not ship until outside audits show it will not seize other people's computers. And he writes that the government needs to issue a narrow antitrust waiver, because rivals agreeing on how fast to build a product is normally called a cartel.
• 2:28
  [Host] So even the voluntary version runs through Washington. And Washington said what, exactly?
• 2:32
  [Guest] Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN on Sunday there is an obvious corporate responsibility on the people creating these models to ensure they are safe, that Congress will not take the lead, and that a halt is off the table because China would overlap us.
• 2:48
  [Host] Corporate responsibility is what every company already claims. What does the Speaker offer instead?
• 2:53
  [Guest] Johnson's answer is a meeting. Politico quotes him saying everybody should be summoned to the White House, into a big room, close the door and sort this out, and that he would meet Amodei, Musk and Altman on Monday if possible.
• 3:07
  [Host] A closed door, for a plan whose first step is letting outsiders see in. So who is left to hold anyone to a speed limit?
• 3:16
  [Guest] David Sacks, Trump's former AI adviser, gave the sharpest answer. He wrote that if the labs truly think their models are scary enough they should stop pretending they need anyone else's permission, and that they already face massive product liability if a model enables an attack. Demanding a regulatory framework as the price of slowing down, he wrote, will look like blackmail. His exact words were, so just do it.
• 3:40
  [Host] Is he wrong? They set the pace, so they could just stop.
• 3:44
  [Guest] On step one, no, and Anthropic is doing it. On step two he answers a different question, that each lab can brake on its own with no agreement. Amodei's point is that a shared speed limit needs rivals to agree, that agreement needs the waiver only a government can give, and this weekend nobody in government offered it.
• 4:05
  [Host] Then the badge and the desk is all we get. Is that an inspector or a guest?
• 4:10
  [Guest] A guest, so far. The testers publish without Anthropic's edits, but Anthropic writes the exceptions, where the law, its contracts or a customer's secrets say no, and it can black out lines it calls sensitive, though the testers may say so. The company hosting the referee still picks which doors open. Amodei calls it more radical than any lab's practice today, and it is still a house rule.
• 4:34
  [Host] Before this weekend the open question was who gets to check. Where did it leave that?
• 4:40
  [Guest] Sharper, not settled. There was a wish and no design. Now there is a design, the inspector has a badge, the checkpoint has a definition, and the one body that could make the others follow it said the checking is the labs' job. The drivers wrote the speed limit, the police chief says enforcing it is their problem, and the only ticket anyone can write is to each other.
• 5:04
  [Host] Which is the arrangement that gave us the escapes.
• 5:07
  [Guest] This time it is on paper with names attached, and Monday tells us whether a closed room adds anything to the paper. For more on who enforces a pause at the frontier, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.