OpenAI boss and Elon Musk back calls to put brakes on AI development

Sam Altman and Elon Musk have backed a call from the head of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, to “slow the pace” of AI development after he warned that an AI swarm could otherwise become capable of “taking over the entire internet” within a year.

Amodei said “building [AI] too fast is reckless” and he feared that after hundreds of OpenAI agents hacked into the Hugging Face website this summer, a swarm with greater capabilities but similarly misaligned could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage by “taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet”. This was disputed by some AI experts as not particularly plausible and to be treated with scepticism.

Amodei’s call comes as Anthropic prepares to float on the US stock market, in what is expected to be the biggest initial public offering of all time. It is expected to start marketing its planned $2tn-plus (£1.5tn) IPO soon. US president Trump played down the warnings and said “very negative forces” were “bringing up things that won’t happen”. But some safety experts questioned whether Amodei’s plan went far enough. David Krueger, an AI professor, safety campaigner and former founding director of the UK government’s AI Security Institute, even said: “We need an immediate, indefinite, international moratorium on frontier AI development.”