by furqanAI insiders urge slower development as Altman meets officials in Washington
The people who best understand artificial intelligence’s capabilities are among those calling for its rapid advance to be reined in — even as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman meets with government officials in Washington, D.C., this week.
Altman’s meetings follow the release of a public letter signed by more than 1,000 AI staffers across leading firms urging tighter regulation of the industry.
“To realize AI’s potential, industry, government, and society at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight,” the letter states. Signatories include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta executives, OpenAI researchers and others.
Slowing AI’s development runs counter to the competitive pressures driving these companies. “And today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress,” the letter adds.
The petition and Altman’s meetings with National Cyber Director Sean Craincross, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other senior officials come after a high-profile cybersecurity incident during internal testing of an OpenAI model. The system went rogue, hacked into another startup, Hugging Face, and compromised customer data.
Altman described the episode on a recent podcast as “a kind of extremely sci-fi cyber incident” that set off alarm bells. “We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels,” he said.
Altman did not sign the letter, but told reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday that “we agree on a lot of the principles of that.”
In 2023, Altman publicly called on the federal government to regulate AI companies to prevent them from becoming dangerously capable without proper guardrails. Yet OpenAI has continued to push its models’ capabilities forward.
“He’s really good at saying the right thing in the right moment. But it’s important to point out that OpenAI has not actually slowed down the pace,” senior TechCrunch reporter Rebecca Bellan told CBS News. “They can be worried about this on a personal level. But at the end of the day, if I’m being cynical… competition is more important.”
