he U.S. government must move “quickly and decisively” to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence which could, in the worst case, cause an “extinction-level threat to the human species,” says a“Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security,” the report, which TIME obtained ahead of its publication, says.
The report's recommendations, many of them previously unthinkable, follow a dizzying series of major developments in AI that have caused many observers to recalibrate their stance on the technology. The chatbot ChatGPT, released in November 2022, was the first time this pace of change became visible to society at large, leading many people to question whether future AIs might pose existential risks to humanity.
Both categories of risk, the report says, are exacerbated by “race dynamics” in the AI industry. The likelihood that the first company to achieve AGI will reap the majority of economic rewards, the report says, incentivizes companies to prioritize speed over safety. “Frontier AI labs face an intense and immediate incentive to scale their AI systems as fast as they can,” the report says.
The Harrises recognize in conversation that their recommendations will strike many in the AI industry as overly zealous. The recommendation to outlaw the open-sourcing of advanced AI model weights, they expect, will not be popular. “Open source is generally a wonderful phenomenon and overall massively positive for the world,” says Edouard, the chief technology officer of Gladstone.