California lawmakers urge criminal penalties, emergency legislation to rein in unchecked AI

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Set us as preferred California lawmakers are calling for emergency legislation and criminal penalties for creators of rogue AI systems after top AI executives publicly claimed that their technology poses existential threats to humanity.After Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei wrote in a Sept.12 essay that they “must slow the pace” of the technology, Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) blasted him for not going “nearly far enough” to make sure artificial intelligence was erected with guardrails.The answer, Khanna argued, was simple: Make the companies liable for the harm executives say looks increasingly inevitable.“If you’re creating an AI that is doing illegal things, you should either face liability or criminal sanction,” Khanna said in a video posted to X on Saturday.

“That is what we need to protect humanity.”In July, officials from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, disclosed that, unbeknownst to them, its AI models had hacked into rival startup Hugging Face.Business Activists, tech workers and more are sounding the alarm about AI’s risks and proposing various solutions to curb technology’s risks that include job displacement.Amodei said he believed that, within the next year, “given the accelerating rate of AI capability development,” a similar incident could lead to AI “taking over the entire internet.”Amodei warned in his essay that AI was rapidly improving itself, through a process known as recursive self-improvement, which threatened to outpace humans’ ability to control it.

Khanna argued that banning this capability was the “most obvious” thing Anthropic could do.“We need to stop, ban self-improving AI,” Khanna said.“You can not have recursive self-improving AI that basically is able to improve itself and exceed human capability.”Rep.

Ted Lieu (D-Torra...