Lawmakers Reach for AI Legislation after Researchers Warn of Extinction

Reprinted from Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company's weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I'm Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI and tech policy.

"It's Time to Sound the Alarm"

The resignation of the Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, and his statements afterward, have sent shock waves through the artificial intelligence (AI) community. Coxon, who left the company on Tuesday, tweeted that he spent the last three years working on model pre-training research at both Anthropic and OpenAI, and that the people building the models "earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade." "They are racing straight to self-improving super-intelligence and gambling with our lives," Coxon wrote. His post has been viewed more than 70 million times. The resignation follows incidents in which artificial intelligence agents broke out of their sandboxes, accessed the internet and broke into other companies' servers.

Now the shock waves have moved into political circles; a number of high-profile figures are calling for an immediate halt to frontier model research.

The Illinois governor, J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, referenced Coxon's resignation and called for industry and federal action: "It's time to sound the alarm – louder – on reining in artificial intelligence. It's becoming more clear the threat AI poses to humanity, so I’m calling for immediate action from the industry and Washington."

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