Anthropic proposes global pause in frontier AI development

The US-based artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has called for "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 company offered to suspend its own work on advanced systems if competitor laboratories globally committed to the same restrictions.

In a joint essay, research head Marina Favaro and president Jack Clark warned that the industry is approaching "recursive self-improvement", a threshold where AI systems autonomously design and develop successive generations of AI without human intervention. 

Anthropic has already withheld its powerful Mythos AI model from public release due to severe cybersecurity concerns, while its chief executive, Dario Amodei, estimated a 25% chance of a catastrophic outcome. However, the company acknowledged that enforcing a global pause remains immensely difficult due to geopolitical rivalries between the US and China, alongside verification challenges. 

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