Anthropic Co-Founder Backs AI Kill Switch

News

1. Anthropic Co-Founder Backs AI Kill Switch

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5. OpenAI Weighs Slower Pace for AI Development as Safety Pressure Builds

6. Anthropic Says AI Is Letting Smaller Attackers Run State-Scale Operations

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said governments may eventually need to require AI companies to maintain independently verifiable ways to shut down advanced systems that become dangerously difficult to control.

Clark told the BBC that major AI labs already have ways to “pull the plug” on their systems, but said regulators may ultimately make such safeguards mandatory.

“Should you mandate for companies to definitely have a kill switch? Is that kill switch verifiable by a third party?” Clark said. “I think that’s the kind of thing society is going to want to know and might want to eventually pass rules around.”

His comments come amid growing concern over whether increasingly capable AI systems can reliably remain under human control. Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei has called for developers to slow frontier advances when safety measures fail to keep pace.

The debate intensified after Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger said he personally put the chance of AI causing human extinction within the next decade at more than 10%. Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton separately told the BBC that a 10% estimate was “not unreasonable,” while stressing that nobody could reliably calculate such a probability.

Clark said precise probability estimates were less useful than the broader need for oversight.

“We are rolling dice with immense risks,” he said. “And the point is, we have to change the course of this industry.”

US lawmakers have proposed a Kill Switch Act that would require shutdown mechanisms for problematic AI systems.