Anthropic calls for global AI slowdown after $965B valuation. Critics claim its just to hobble competition.

Anthropic said artificial intelligence is advancing so rapidly that an industry-wide pause is needed to slow the pace of development while companies get a handle on potential societal risks. The AI juggernaut published a blog post Thursday warning that AI systems could soon be able to improve themselves without human intervention, resulting in chaos.Critics and rivals have cast similar statements in the past from Anthropic — which dethroned OpenAI as the most valuable AI company last month – as part of a bid to hobble the competition in the red-hot race to develop advanced artificial intelligence. Anthropic has long warned that the power of its models could pose risks to humanity.Anthropic’s Chief Executive Dario Amodei feuded for months with the White House over AI safety related to the use of its systems in military applications.  Anthropic called on top AI labs to weigh slowing the pace of development and offered internal data that showed the speedy improvement of its own models. “We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology,” the post stated.It was written by Anthropic’s head of internal research Marina Favaro and head of policy Jack Clark. The ability to slow global AI development would “likely be a good thing,” they added.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously accused Anthropic of doing “fear-based marketing.”“It is clearly incredible marketing to say, ‘We have built a bomb, we are about to drop it on your head.

We will sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million,’” he said last month.Anthropic’s post outlined how model advances appear to be moving toward “recursive self-improvement,” or AI systems that can improve on their own without human intervention.AI experts have warned that the phenomenon could wreak havoc on society.  “This would revolutionize knowle...