The bosses of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence companies are calling for regulation and a slower pace of development, raising eyebrows across the business world.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have been joined by DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk in urging restraint while safety frameworks and regulation catch up.
Questions about why these influential figures are now speaking out have been swirling through the City all week, with the possible explanations proving quite revealing.
The argument circulating among those in the AI space is that this is about regulatory capture, pure and simple, with powerful incumbents seeking to pull up the ladder behind them.
Experts including columnist Lewis Liu have warned against this for years, arguing that a small group of dominant firms now want to shape the rules in their favour.
The world’s top AI companies would certainly prefer to write their own regulatory framework rather than have one imposed upon them from outside.
Some analysts also suggest that a slowdown would be quite convenient, allowing firms to generate a return on the more than $790bn that has been pumped into AI infrastructure so far this year.
Time spent focused on monetisation rather than relentless technological improvement could work considerably in their favour, at least in the near term.
Meanwhile, all this talk of civilisational collapse needs to be seen in the context of looming stock market listings, with Anthropic and OpenAI both planning to go public in the future.
Musk notably toned down his extinction rhetoric as soon as his own firm went public, suggesting a pattern that others may now be following ahead of their own IPOs.
Demonstrating robust protocols, solid governance, and capable risk management would certainly help these companies present themselves attractively to prospective public market investors.
Another theory doing the rounds is that the technology itself may be approaching its peak, with genuine superintelligence dismissed by some as overhyped, making an agreed slowdown a useful piece of cover.
The final possibility is that the leaders of these era-defining companies have suffered a collective attack of civic mindedness and are genuinely sounding the alarm about the power they wield.
Regulatory capture and preparations for life as public companies, however, remain the far more likely drivers behind these recent and convenient calls for caution.