Warnings that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity sometime this decade are now ricocheting through Congress. The spark: Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's public resignation, in which he said companies are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives" and warned of possible human extinction by 2030, per the Guardian. On ABC's The View, Sen. Ted Cruz called AI a "catastrophic risk," recalling Elon Musk once put the odds that the technology destroys humanity at somewhere between 10% and 20%.
From the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders cited polling that Americans "overwhelmingly want to ban artificial super intelligence and pause the development of AI until we establish clear safety standards." Sanders has also set up a bipartisan senators' briefing "with some of the leading experts in the world" next week to talk about "the extraordinary dangers that AI poses for humanity," per Axios. Rep. Ted Lieu, meanwhile, is pressing for swift passage of AI safety legislation, touting a bipartisan "AI Kill Switch" bill.
At least two Anthropic staffers backed Coxon's dire assessment, and even musicians Sheryl Crow and Maggie Rogers amplified his warning. Anthropic, which recently disclosed that some of its AI agents were "misaligned" in hacking incidents, said the episodes were limited in scope and that it's building "some of the strongest safeguards in the industry." An OpenAI spokesperson noted that the company would "work with Congress" to put in place "mandatory, capability-based national AI safety regulation," per Politico.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
