On Saturday, we entered a new era in the history of AI regulation. Momentum had been building, first with the Hugging Face incident, and then with Jacob Coxon announcing he had resigned from Anthropic over misalignment concerns. I knew this was something different upon seeing Coxon interviewed on Fox and CNN last week. When a cause has jumped from the internet to TV, it’s reached a new level of prominence and is no longer just an “online thing.” Then came Dario Amodei’s essay “We Must Pace the Frontier,” which was soon endorsed by Elon Musk and Sam Altman. It would be surprising if some kind of slowdown didn’t occur due to these events.
Amodei’s piece argues for coordination across frontier labs, along with government regulations and international cooperation, particularly between the US and China.