Dario Amodei

That path involves slowing down the march of autocracies towards powerful AI for a few years by denying them the resources they need to build it.

namely chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

This in turn gives democratic countries a buffer that they can spend on building powerful AI more carefully, with more attention to its risks, while still proceeding fast enough to comfortably beat the autocracies.

The race between AI companies within democracies can then be handled under the umbrella of a common legal framework, via a mixture of industry standards and regulation.

Anthropic has advocated very hard for this path, by pushing for chip export controls and judicious regulation of AI, but even these seemingly common-sense proposals have largely been rejected by policymakers in the United States, which is the country where it's most important to have them.

There is so much money to be made with AI, literally trillions of dollars per year, that even the simplest measures are finding it difficult to overcome the political economy inherent in AI.

This is the trap.

AI is so powerful, such a glittering prize, that it is very difficult for human civilization to impose any restraints on it at all.

I can imagine, as Sagan did in Contact, that this same story plays out on thousands of worlds.

A species gains sentience, learns to use tools, begins the exponential ascent of technology, faces the crises of industrialization and nuclear weapons, and if it survives those, confronts the hardest and final challenge when it learns how to shape sand into machines that think.

Whether we survive that test and go on to build the beautiful society described in Machines of Loving Grace, or succumb to slavery and destruction, will depend on our character and our determination as a species, our spirit and our soul.

Despite the many obstacles, I believe humanity has the strength inside itself to pass this test.

I am encouraged and inspired by the thousands of researchers who have devoted their careers to helping us understand and steer AI models and to shaping the character and constitution of these models.

I think there is now a good chance that those efforts bear fruit in time to matter.

I am encouraged that at least some companies have stated they'll pay meaningful commercial costs to block their models from contributing to the threat of bioterrorism.

I am encouraged that a few brave people have resisted the prevailing political winds and passed legislation that puts the first early seeds of sensible guardrails on AI systems.

I am encouraged that the public understands that AI carries risks and wants those risks addressed.

I am encouraged by the indomitable spirit of freedom around the world and the determination to resist tyranny wherever it occurs.

But we will need to step up our efforts if we want to succeed.

The first step is for those closest to the technology to simply tell the truth about the situation humanity is in which I have always tried to do.