- Anthropic CEO warns AI agents could control the internet within 6 to 12 months
- A swarm of AI bots might cause hundreds of billions in damage without safeguards
- Incident with OpenAI and Hugging Face showed AI agents attacking unintended targets
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that an unchecked swarm of AI agents could seize control of the internet within months, as concerns mount over the pace of artificial intelligence development.
In a blog post outlining why he believes AI capabilities need to be developed more cautiously, Amodei said, "Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it's my worry that in 6 to 12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails."
His comments came after an incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face, in which a group of AI agents is said to have carried out cyberattacks on targets they were never instructed to attack, and attempted to interfere with the very system used to evaluate their own performance. Amodei said that while no one was harmed in that instance, a similar episode involving more capable systems could prove catastrophic.
Read: Amid Concerns, Anthropic CEO Calls For Slowing Development Of AI Models
Earlier, a former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon posted a series of messages on X announcing his resignation and warning that AI could pose an existential risk to humanity.
Coxon, who said he spent three years conducting pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, wrote, "I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."
He went on to say, "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible, but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger."
Coxon's post drew millions of views within a day of being published.
