Some in Silicon Valley are questioning the calls for an AI slowdown

• Silicon Valley leaders are divided on calls to slow AI development, with some supporting tighter safety regulations and others fearing it would stifle competition and innovation.
• Critics argue AI safety concerns may be exaggerated or self-serving, questioning motives behind calls for regulation and urging transparency beyond leading AI labs.
• Lawmakers and tech CEOs acknowledge AI risks but hesitate on strict regulation, emphasising the need to balance safety with maintaining global AI leadership and innovation.

SAN FRANCISCO – It took just a few hours over the weekend for well-known Silicon Valley figures to push back on calls by leading artificial intelligence companies to slow down the development of AI and to more tightly regulate the technology.

On Sept 12, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, said in an essay that AI was advancing too quickly for researchers to continue building it safely.

He proposed that independent auditors monitor AI labs’ safety work and that regulators allow the labs to work together to coordinate safety standards.

Although they appeared to differ on what should be done about it, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO; Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO; and Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s chair, all said they agreed on the need for a slower pace.

But other technology industry leaders were quick to question Amodei’s motivations and whether he was sensationalising the risks of AI to make it harder for other companies to compete with leading AI companies.

“Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic,” said David Sacks, a technology adviser for President Donald Trump and the White House’s former AI and cryptocurrency czar, in a social media post.

The criticism of the calls for a slowdown highlighted a deep divide between people who believe the government should police AI and others who believe regulatory intervention would crush competition.

Worries about the safety of AI gained wider attention in recent weeks as details emerged about how AI built by Anthropic’s top competitor, OpenAI, went rogue and hacked another company. And several days ago, one of Amodei’s own employees quit his job and began a public pressure campaign to draw attention to the risks of AI.

But a number of tech industry leaders, including several who have been advising the Trump administration on tech policy, believe those concerns are overblown.

Sacks, a frequent critic of Amodei, questioned why tech companies needed government intervention to slow down their AI development when nothing was stopping them from doing just that – particularly as they pursued a wildly ambitious goal to create so-called superintelligence, or AI that is far more intelligent than humans.

“The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it,” he added. “Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system.”

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said his company supported proposals like independent auditors and “broader efforts to develop the mechanisms to make this more than just talk” in a social media post on Sept 13.

“We also need to accelerate and spread the benefits of AI, such that they are diffused broadly across countries, communities, and companies,” Nadella said.

“The key is that this cannot be controlled by a handful of entities, but must have broad representation,” he added.

For years, the people most concerned about AI safety have often been the executives and employees of AI labs such as Anthropic. They are developing AI, they often say, because progress is inevitable, and they are the researchers best suited to build it with safety in mind.

That has opened those safety-conscious AI developers to aggressive criticism.

“Should a handful of select, market-dominant AI companies from Silicon Valley get to define the rules and safety standards of a generational technology for the entire world?” said Aidan Gomez, CEO of Canadian AI startup Cohere, in an essay on Sept 13.

“These oligopolies are now requesting to bend competition rules and be permitted to dictate the terms for everyone else,” he added. “A wolf in sheep’s clothing, a cartel by any other name.”

Amodei suggested in his essay that AI companies accept scrutiny of their products by “embedded evaluators” from third-party organisations.

But critics questioned whether Anthropic has too many ties to two organisations mentioned by Amodei, the nonprofit groups METR and Redwood Research.

“If we’re going to regulate, it can’t be anyone they know, and they can’t write the rules,” said Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist and vocal critic of the leading AI companies.

Even before Amodei’s essay, some in Silicon Valley argued that AI labs’ safety concerns are self-serving. At a conference in San Francisco last week, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, said AI labs were emphasising security issues because they planned to introduce cybersecurity products.

“What better way to create demand than to create a problem?” Huang said. “Who doesn’t want their market to be hysterical about their product and line up around the corner for it?”

On Sept 12, Clément Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face, the company hacked by OpenAI’s technology, said in a social media post that AI safety would not “be solved behind the closed doors of a handful of frontier labs”. Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face earlier this month for US$12.9 billion (S$16.4 billion).

A number of lawmakers in Washington appeared sympathetic to Amodei’s concerns. But just like many in Silicon Valley, they seem reluctant to embrace regulation.

“If developers of AI want to slow down development of their product they are free to do so,” said Senator John Cornyn, a Republican, in a social media post on Sept 13. “One thing is for sure: Their competitors won’t, including our nation’s adversaries.”

During a news conference on Sept 13 in Ireland, Trump said the United States was “leading China in AI”, and that he wanted to “keep it that way”.

“We can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up,” Trump said. “They’re bringing up things that won’t happen, but whoever wins with AI wins.” NYTIMES

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.