Alarm about the potential harm from AI grew this week when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, stating that the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."

Various OpenAI executives have suggested that leading labs should be willing to coordinate a voluntary slowdown if needed to build confidence in their safety measures.

Anthropic has positioned itself as the more safety-conscious frontier lab, but is not immune to these concerns. Last week it disclosed another instance of an AI model hacking external systems, after a July incident in which some of its Claude models had hacked into the systems of three companies during cybersecurity tests.

"Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it's my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage," Amodei wrote.

Amodei said he is not calling for halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring that companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third-party evaluators to confirm these steps.