Why The AI CEOs REALLY Want To Be Regulated

Calls to regulate the artificial intelligence (AI) sector have reached a fever pitch over the last week. Fearmongering about the prospects of a totally unregulated AI industry has been around as long as the industry itself. But the current storm began last Tuesday when an engineer at Anthropic—the firm best known for its chatbot Claude—resigned, citing safety concerns.

The engineer claimed that many people at top AI firms earnestly believe the technology could wipe out humanity by the end of the 2020s. Those claims got a boost on Saturday when Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, published an essay calling for an across-the-board slowdown of AI development. Other prominent CEOs like Sam Altman and Elon Musk then said they agreed with Amodei.

The media, which is always on the lookout for a new mass extinction scare, jumped on what could appear to anyone who didn’t actually read Amodei’s essay as confirmation from the top AI companies that those warning of an AI apocalypse are right.

Groups and commentators from all over the political spectrum then jumped into the fight, the topic dominated the news cycle, and now the top AI CEOs are reportedly heading to the White House for a meeting about AI risks.

There’s a lot going on here. But almost none of it truly has anything to do with our safety.

There are, to be sure, people out there who have genuine concerns about the risks posed by the accelerating pace of AI development. But it is hard to believe that’s anywhere close to the primary motivation for the sudden push for more regulations from the chief executives of the companies currently dominating the AI sector.

I say sudden, but really this isn’t new. It’s only just gotten a lot more attention. The truth is, many of these top AI CEOs have been pushing for greater regulation of their industry for some time now. Their efforts have escalated in recent months. Over the summer, Amodei, Altman, and Demis Hassabis—the CEO of Google’s DeepMind—all published written calls for the creation of remarkably similar AI regulatory regimes.

A few weeks later, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg released a lengthy letter where he also argued that AI needs to be regulated globally...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE 100% FREE HERE).

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