The Guardian reports:

A day after a former researcher at Anthropic made an apocalyptic declaration about artificial intelligence, more researchers and staff members at the AI startup publicly agreed with him and posted their own dire warnings.

In response, Elon Musk and other conservative figures on X, formerly Twitter, called the chorus of concerns a “setup” and a “psyop”.

The Anthropic insiders fear the technology they are building could become so advanced and dangerous as to cause human extinction within the decade, and they assert many of their colleagues feel the same but haven’t said so publicly.

These researchers and staff are posting in response to a now-viral thread from Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who said on Wednesday he was resigning from the company because neither Anthropic nor its competitor OpenAI, also his former employer, were building AI models responsibly and are “gambling with our lives”.

Anna Wang, who works on Artificial General Intelligence Safety at Anthropic and previously worked at Google’s DeepMind, said Thursday that many people at Anthropic want to slow down development to come up with a plan to mitigate the risks that could come with these AI models.

“There is not yet a viable scientific plan to solve risks from recursively self-improving AI,” Wang wrote on X.

Drake Thomas, another Anthropic employee, said that he respected Coxon’s choice to abstain from building these models if he worries they could pose planet-scale risks.

“Things are moving way too fast, we don’t have anywhere near the degree of assurance we’ll want for ASI [artificial superintelligence],” Thomas said.

Musk took a more adversarial stance. “Seems like a setup,” he wrote.

Coxon replied to the world’s richest man with a selfie, writing, “I’m real and these are my real beliefs. You could ask your xAI researchers about me if you hadn’t fired them.” [Continue reading…]