Why tech giants want to strangle AI with red tape

One of the joys of writing about business is that rare moment when you realise conventions are shifting in front of you. It brings a shiver down the spine. Vaingloriously, you start scribbling down every detail of your surroundings, as if you are drafting the opening lines of a bestseller. It happened to your columnist recently in San Francisco, sitting in the pristine offices of Anthropic, a darling of the artificial-intelligence (AI) scene. When Jack Clark, one of Anthropic’s co-founders, drew an analogy between the Baruch Plan, a (failed) effort in 1946 to put the world’s atomic weapons under UN control, and the need for global co-ordination to prevent the proliferation of harmful AI, there was that old familiar tingle. When entrepreneurs compare their creations, even tangentially, to nuclear bombs, it feels like a turning point.

Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene late last year there has been no shortage of angst about the existential risks posed by AI. But this is different. Listen to some of the field’s pioneers and they are less worried about a dystopian future when machines outthink humans, and more about the dangers lurking within the stuff they are making now. ChatGPT is an example of “generative” ai, which creates humanlike content based on its analysis of texts, images and sounds on the internet. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the startup that built it, told a congressional hearing this month that regulatory intervention is critical to manage the risks of the increasingly powerful “large language models” (LLMs) behind the bots.