Anthropic researcher puts risk of AI wiping out humanity at over 10%
Researchers at the artificial intelligence giant Anthropic say they’re worried the technology could threaten humanity, BBC World Service reported. Anthropic’s alignment science lead said he personally believed there was a greater than 10% chance AI could kill us all in the next decade, BBC News and BBC World Service reported.
There have been a growing number of voices within the industry calling for international coordination to slow AI development.
Evan Hubinger said in a post on X the risk from the models which currently exist was “low” but he was “worried” the technology might develop and improve itself soon to the point where it posed an existential risk to humanity. He did not spell out how he thought AI systems could in the future result in humans being wiped out.
But his comments are the latest in a series of increasingly stark warnings about AI, with the debate shifting from whether it truly poses a risk to how big that risk is.
Hubinger’s intervention was in response to another post on X from Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who has just quit Anthropic and previously worked at OpenAI.
“Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote.
“These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”
OpenAI has been approached for comment.
She told the World at One on BBC Radio Four some of it could be “PR and marketing” however, as Anthropic and OpenAI raced towards highly anticipated stock market debuts.
But she added: “Why would someone want to say that? I would plead with investors not to invest in this company if that is their value system.”
Meanwhile, the owner of China’s largest messaging service, WeChat, has thanked a US cybersecurity firm for uncovering a vulnerability that could have put more than a billion users at risk. Tencent, which owns WeChat, says it’s now fixed its software.
The American firm Caliph says it created an AI-powered cyberattack worm that could spread rapidly through WeChat accounts. The hack worked by calling the contacts of the infected accounts and then taking control of them within seconds. Caliph says AI allowed it to develop the hack in just over a week, a task that would normally take a team of hackers months. WeChat is often described as China’s app for everything, combining messaging, mobile payments, gaming and shopping on one platform and with 1.4 billion monthly users.
