Anthropic is calling on major artificial intelligence labs to consider a co-ordinated and verifiable pause in development, warning that rapid advances in the technology could soon allow AI systems to improve themselves faster than society can manage the risks.
The Claude creator said AI's ability to complete tasks on its own has been doubling roughly every four months and it was headed for "recursive self-improvement" - the point at which the technology can improve without human intervention.
"If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them and shape their behaviour all grow much more important," the startup said in a lengthy blog post on Thursday, adding that a pause would allow society to "deal with its immense implications".
