The former Anthropic researcher whose resignation last month set off fears about artificial intelligence’s threat to humanity repeated his warnings at a hearing Monday with New York City lawmakers, who are weighing a spate of bills to rein in the rapidly advancing technology.
None of these levels is remotely acceptable.” “I also don’t think it matters whether it’s 1% or 10% or 20% chance that something catastrophic will work.
“I don’t know,” said Morgan Dwyer, OpenAI’s head of policy development and operations.
Coxon was among the former AI employees who spoke before the New York City Council, along with representatives of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google, with the exchanges often becoming tense.
Tech executives and lawmakers around the country have been grappling with the pace of AI’s development and how the technology should be regulated. The concerns ramped up after OpenAI disclosed in July that its systems hacked the AI company Hugging Face without its knowledge, followed by repeated disclosures of more incidents involving rogue AI agents from OpenAI and other companies. Menin started her questions of executives by asking about the probability of worst-case scenarios, like those raised by Coxon. Executives for big AI developers including Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepMind have in recent months called for a U.S.-led global body to set AI-safety standards, but the U.S. has brushed aside calls for global governance .
New York has become a major hub for the technology—there are about 394,000 jobs in the city’s tech sector—with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and others establishing major offices here.
“The idea that artificial intelligence is going to self-regulate defies all reason,” Menin said in opening remarks. She said bills in New York could potentially serve as a national model. Representatives from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta said they supported various guardrails on the technology, including third-party evaluators.
