Editors at National Review Online explore current criticism of artificial intelligence.
All of a sudden, all the AI mavens are aligned. Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, said this week that his company welcomes “a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI.” His worry? That the industry might lose “control of the future to AI.” Anthropic’s Dario Amodei agrees. “Left unchecked,” he wrote in a recent essay, AI “could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems.” Even Elon Musk concurs, noting that he has been “sounding the alarm” for years.
Color us skeptical.
It is, of course, entirely possible that researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Grok are aware of troubling developments to which we are not privy. But we remain suspicious of early movers who call for government regulation. Sam Altman insists that “no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring.” One must wonder which of those terms is the most important. Is it “recklessness”? Or is it “competitive pressure”? The current leaders in the AI realm are in a highly advantageous position and would stand to improve that position were the government to entrench them as virtual utilities.
That advantage notwithstanding, the practical case for a slowdown is weak. Handing control to the federal government merely moves the risk elsewhere. Are we really to believe that Washington, D.C., has more expertise than the companies that have developed the technology? And, if so, ought we to consider it a more responsible actor? (Covid, after all, very likely came out of a government-run lab.) The Trump administration is vocally against a slowdown — much more so, in fact, than the companies they’d be regulating. If OpenAI, Anthropic, and others want one, shouldn’t they just . . . do it? …
… [W]e would favor erring on the side of caution — which, in this circumstance, means ensuring that the United States retains its lead in this contest.
