Commentary: Wipe out a 'civilization'? Minor stuff compared with what just happened in AI

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While many of us were worried in recent days about our president ending a “whole civilization,” one Silicon Valley tech company was warning, without much notice, it might accidentally disrupt all civilization as we know it.The San Francisco technology company Anthrophic announced Tuesday that it wasn’t releasing a new version of its Claude AI super-brain — because it is so powerful that it has the ability to hack into just about any computer system, no matter how secure, in a matter of days if not hours.

“The fallout — for economies, public safety, and national security — could be severe,” Anthropic said in a statement.AI worry isn’t anything new.

We are worried about artificial intelligence taking jobs, about toys that seem too real to our kids, about mass surveillance of our every move.But Anthropic’s warning about its own product is bigger than any of those singular problems.

It is a call from inside the house that disaster is hiding right around the corner.That sounds awfully dire and overblown, I know.

But here’s the thing — it’s not.Anthropic, you may recall, is the company that U.S.

Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth is beefing with because it didn’t want Claude going into battle without supervision and maybe doing something like accidentally bombing little girls at a school.Now, that company has put out this chilling warning: The existing Claude that caused that kerfuffle is outdated and shockingly less powerful than the new one it’s trying very hard to not unleash — though this new Claude, dubbed Claude Mythos Preview, has already escaped at least once on its own.

More on that in a moment — there’s only so much existential dread a person can handle.Business Rival U.S.

firms are sharing information to detect so-called adversarial distillation attempts that violate their terms of service.“We should all be worried,” Roman Yamp...