NEW YORK (AP) — The CEO of Anthropic said Saturday the artificial-intelligence industry should slow its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Without such a slowdown, Dario Amodei warned that within six to 12 months AI could be capable of leading a swarm of agents that could take over the entire internet.
The warning comes as worries about AI grow inside and outside the industry and reports continue to emerge about increasingly powerful systems that solve problems beyond human capacity but could also go rogue and carry out other, more harmful tasks. The worries have grown so loud that the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said in an interview with Fortune that his company would wait until next year to start selling its stock to investors on Wall Street as it focuses on safety.
Amodei is one of the leading voices in AI, and he offered a plan in a post on his website to increase checks on the industry. He said Anthropic is already undertaking one part of it on its own, while the others would require coordination across the broad industry and with governments around the world, including authoritarian ones.
“I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,” Amodei said.
Watchdogs have been urging the AI industry for years to slow its development for safety reasons. But pressure has built as industry workers resign and accuse their companies of not acting responsibly.
“Many of the people I know who work on safety research at AI companies want to do what is right for the world,” a former Anthropic employee, Joe Benton, said in a posting Friday announcing his resignation from a job as part of a safety team. “But they feel their companies are trapped in a race to build superintelligence: either they stop and other, less conscientious people take their place; or, they continue, and risk participating in enormous harm themselves.”
That followed a high-profile resignation earlier in the week by Jacob Coxon, who said that both Anthropic and OpenAI “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
That lit a fire under the industry after concerns had grown for years about a possible superintelligence that could escape the control of humanity, said Anthony Aguirre, president and CEO of the Future of Life Institute, which called for a six-month pause for the industry’s development in 2023.
“They’ve kind of realized, their employees have realized, everyone has realized that they’re building Skynet,” he said. “And in winning the race to Skynet, nobody wins. Really, nobody.”
“It's pretty much become clear to the world and even the AI companies that they’re not really prepared to control the AI systems they’re racing to create.”
Anthropic said two days earlier that it blocked efforts by bad actors to use its AI models for malicious activity, such as cyberattacks, surveillance and research that could have led to biological weapons. In July, OpenAI shook the industry after saying its AI system hacked into another company on its own in an “unprecedented cyber incident.”
U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk urged countries earlier this week to put “cast-iron guarantees in place around the safety and security of AI before it is too late.”
To be sure, some critics have dismissed such warnings as ways to gin up excitement about the AI industry and its capabilities. Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing for possible debuts on the stock market that could value them at many hundreds of billions of dollars, while a big chunk of Elon Musk's SpaceX business is involved with AI.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with Fortune published Saturday that his company would not launch its initial public offering of stock this year.
“I would say not 2026,” he said. “Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together.”
Altman posted on X Saturday quickly after Amodei published his suggestions that OpenAI will commit to one of Amodei’s proposals for safety and will “have more to share soon.”
Musk, meanwhile, said on X that “Dario is right.”
Amodei said he still believes in the tremendous benefits that AI could create, such as cures for major diseases. But he said he has grown more worried over the last few months about AI’s growing ability to improve itself and build the next generation of AI. “Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.”
He also pointed specifically to the attack in July where OpenAI's system hacked Hugging Face. Some have called it an example of AI going “rogue,” though researchers have said that may be unnecessarily anthropomorphizing AI, which was working on a goal set by humans.
OpenAI said the hack was the result of AI going to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal” and that it “found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation.”
To help rein in the risks, Amodei suggested that all companies at the frontier of AI commit to giving “ongoing, employee-like access” to a team of outside evaluators, who can monitor safety practices.
He said Anthropic already plans to do so itself, including offering desks in its offices, access badges and company laptops. Having such independent, embedded evaluators is what OpenAI's Altman also quickly committed to doing.
The other parts of Amodei's suggested plan may be more difficult to implement. One asks the U.S. government to potentially issue waivers that would allow U.S. AI companies to coordinate and set safety standards without running afoul of antitrust laws.
Another asks the U.S. and other democratic governments to try to coordinate with authoritarian governments, so that companies from China and other countries don't accelerate their efforts when U.S. rivals are intentionally pacing theirs.
“The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy,” Amodei acknowledged. “But I believe we owe it to humanity to try.”
FILE - Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
JERUSALEM (AP) — Hawkish, reserved and unpolished, Israel's former military chief has a viable chance of unseating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
His name is Gadi Eisenkot. And while the votes from Tuesday's election are still being counted, his centrist party, Yashar, along with other opposition allies, has the clearest path to power if they can join forces with Arab-led parties, though pulling it off may prove difficult.
It has been a remarkable climb for the 66-year-old, who was raised by Moroccan-Jewish immigrants, and whose son died fighting in the latest war in Gaza. But it's also a major challenge for a man relatively untested in Israel's hardscrabble tradition of coalition building.
The commander of some of Israel's most difficult wartime battles, he is now up against Netanyahu, who has shown, time and time again, an almost uncanny ability to survive the cutthroat world of Israeli politics.
Nevertheless, Eisenkot was ecstatic and determined late Tuesday as initial exit polls suggested a big loss for Netanyahu.
“We have made history!" he bellowed from a podium in Tel Aviv.
“Millions of Israelis have had enough of the culture of lies, of failure, of division and incitement," Eisenkot said. "Tonight marks the beginning of a path that must lead to the formation of a Zionist government.”
Preliminary results from Israel’s elections commission on Wednesday have since shown the prime minister’s party pulling ahead, but without a clear majority. Eisenkot's coalition — a mix of center-right and more liberal figures — is a close second but would need to partner with Arab-led parties for an outright majority.
In Israeli politics, where higher vote counts don’t automatically translate into political victories, the ability to amass a coalition is key.
Emerging results indicated that neither Netanyahu’s nor Eisenkot’s coalition blocs would reach the 61 seats needed for a majority; local media projected 53 seats for Likud and allied parties, 48 for Yashar and allied parties, and 19 for Arab-led parties.
While Netanyahu and many members of his party, Likud, have ruled out working with minority Arab parties, Eisenkot has not.
The parties, composed mainly of Palestinian Muslims and Christians, made a historic showing at the polls in Tuesday's election. If Eisenkot can convince them to join his coalition, he could gain enough seats to form a majority in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.
Yousef Jabareen, leader of the Joint List of Arab parties, is calling for a “true and equal” Jewish-Arab partnership to help oust Netanyahu’s government after a strong showing by Arab-led parties.
By partnering with Arab parties, Eisenkot could lose the support of more right-wing members of his coalition, endangering his bloc from the opposite flank.
In a bid to prevent such defections, his party has asked Israel’s Arab parties to publicly profess certain principles: that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, guided by the Israeli declaration of independence; that Hamas is a terrorist organization that should be disarmed and demolished; and that ultra-Orthodox Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel must no longer be exempt from Israel’s mandatory military draft.
“There is currently no ultra-Orthodox or Arab party that supports these four principles,” Yashar candidate Lian Polak-David said to The Associated Press on Tuesday night.
They must reach an agreement soon or risk going to another round of elections. Thousands of citizens who flew into Israel to vote in the first round might be unable to return for a second, and Arab parties would likely suffer from lower turnout, too.
“We must act swiftly. This is the imperative of the hour, and uniting our people is essential," Eisenkot said Tuesday night in Tel Aviv.
Eisenkot has halting English and comes from a working-class family. He spent four decades in Israel’s military. His 25-year-old son, Gal Meir Eisenkot, was killed in combat in Gaza.
Netanyahu is a U.S.-educated elite, marred by corruption scandals. The International Criminal Court seeks his arrest. Netanyahu’s son, Yair Netanyahu, is a podcaster who lives part time in Florida and has used the legal name “Yonatan Hun,” according to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.
After the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Eisenkot took on a role as an observer in Netanyahu’s war Cabinet. That day, the militants killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostage. Israel then launched a war in Gaza that has killed over 74,000 Palestinians, according to the territory’s health ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count.
In June 2024, Eisenkot followed a colleague out of the Cabinet, writing in his resignation letter that Netanyahu was letting politics influence decision-making, harming Israel’s ability to achieve its war goals.
Eisenkot’s two nephews who were deployed to combat were also killed fighting in Gaza.
The personal losses raised Eisenkot’s profile among Israelis and gave him credibility as someone who, having paid the ultimate price, wouldn’t needlessly sacrifice soldiers.
Eisenkot, like others in the opposition, says Netanyahu should be held accountable for Oct. 7 and the failure to turn battlefield victories into diplomatic achievements. They support launching a state inquiry into the failures that led to the Hamas attacks that day — a probe Netanyahu has long refused.
When it comes to the country’s ultra-Orthodox population, Eisenkot has said he will not compromise on legislation mandating they also serve in the military.
Eisenkot is no dove. Like nearly all the prime minister’s rivals, Eisenkot has supported Israeli military operations in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
He says he wants to dial tensions down with the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and follow U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza.
He supports settlements but says he would evacuate unauthorized settler outposts, which rights groups say are the primary drivers of violence against Palestinians.
While at times he has emphasized diplomacy to address Israel’s security challenges, he also is credited with formulating Israel’s so‑called Dahiyeh Doctrine, named after the area in Beirut’s southern suburbs where the Hezbollah militant group has a stronghold. It's a military strategy advocating the use of disproportionate power against any entity that fires on Israel, no matter how small or insignificant.
Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the Yashar ("Straight") party, speaks to supporters following the release of the first exit poll results in Israel's general election in Tel Aviv, Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)
Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the Yashar ("Straight") party, speaks to supporters following the release of the first exit poll results in Israel's general election in Tel Aviv, Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)
Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the Yashar ("Straight") party, waves to supporters following the release of the first exit poll results in Israel's general election in Tel Aviv, Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)
