The world is talking about AI’s dangers. Now, it’s time to act

By KEVIN ROOSE

This, friends, will be my final column at The New York Times. I am off to new adventures, including publishing a book about the race to create artificial general intelligence and starting a new podcast with my “Hard Fork” co-host, Casey Newton. It has been an honor to spend the last nine years as your tech columnist, testing out all manner of gadgets, selling NFTs and being seduced by unhinged chatbots in the name of journalism.

Before I go, my editor has invited me to share some parting thoughts on the AI moment we’re in. So I thought I’d give a brief, honest reflection on how I’m feeling about AI these days, and how my reporting from inside the San Francisco tech bubble has left me feeling both hopeful and scared for our collective future.

First, the hopeful part.

I have been surprised and heartened, in recent days, by the way conversations about AI risk have taken center stage. This month, the viral resignation of a young Anthropic employee, Jacob Coxon, did what years of worried opinion essays and AI summits had not: focused the world’s attention on the potentially extreme dangers posed by this technology.

The substance of Coxon’s message was nothing AI insiders hadn’t been saying for years. But his timing — just days after new revelations about the autonomous hack of Hugging Face by a swarm of OpenAI agents, at a time of rising concern about AI risk more generally — helped carry the message far outside the AI bubble.

(I should add my parting, mandatory AI disclosure: The Times is suing OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity over alleged copyright violations. The companies deny the claims.)

Even more mood-lifting was the response to the public call this month by Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, for a global slowdown in AI development — a step that many AI researchers had privately told me they thought was necessary to prevent a catastrophe, but that few had been willing to push for in public.

Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis and other prominent AI leaders quickly echoed Amodei’s concerns and some of his recommendations, such as his call for putting “embedded evaluators” inside leading AI companies to monitor their systems for dangerous behavior.

Normally, these men are the fiercest of rivals. (Amodei and Altman, for example, can barely stand each other, and Musk had an expensive, failed lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI this year.) But recent, rapid advances in AI capabilities, and their shared worry about rogue systems taking over critical infrastructure, seem to have given them common cause. That kind of cross-industry cooperation is going to be critical in the coming months and years, and it was good to see it materialize so quickly.

And to ward off the inevitable conspiracy theories: No, this is not a coordinated psyop, or an industrywide scheme to achieve regulatory capture. Many of these figures have been warning about the existential threat of AI for years, long before they had products to sell and companies to run. The news is just that they’re actually being listened to now, after years of being written off as doomsaying Chicken Littles.

Like Amodei and Altman, I’ve been nervous about the pace of AI progress for years. And until recently, it seemed as if actually doing anything to slow down the race was vanishingly unlikely. But the outpouring of calls from AI leaders and rank-and-file employees alike for a global, coordinated pause on AI development in the past week has made me reconsider my pessimism.

Maybe we are on the narrow path to AI utopia — one in which policymakers and the public are sufficiently alarmed about the risks of building these systems to put some commonsense guardrails in place, and AI leaders are temporarily convinced to put humanity’s best interests above their own bottom lines. In that world, a coordinated pause could buy us time to understand and manage the worst of the risks, while continuing to push forward narrower AI applications in fields like medicine and science, where everyone basically agrees we should move as fast as possible