It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

Over the last several months, the two leading frontier AI labs have shown some brazen behavior.

It started with a series of​ carefully planned announcements​ and reports from OpenAI that try to establish how unnerving and powerful (not to mention ​felonious​) their LLM-powered agent systems have become.

They then handed the baton to Anthropic, whose employees began ​publicly debating​ the exact probability that these technologies would lead to human extinction. They delivered this all with an eerie calmness that conveyed a nihilistic inevitability about their work.

The ground suitably softened, the campaign crescendoed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodi releasing a letter, titled ​“We Must Pace the Frontier,”​ in which he enumerates all the harms his own company’s research might cause, and then, instead of apologizing and promising to stop, concludes that catastrophe can only be avoided if we “build the technology in the right way,” which involves – surprise, surprise – the government slowing down potential competitors and allowing the labs to take the lead in advancing the relevant tech. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly ​tweeted his support​ for this brave plan.

Internally, these labs have long embraced this style of messianic thinking, casting themselves as humanity’s only hope against the defied powers of superintelligent AI. This summer, in some sense, was their attempt to induct the rest of us into this long-held ideology.

Instead of inspiring the masses to stand up and applaud these engineers’ heroic rationalism, it made us instead start to ask, “What the hell is going on over in those labs?”

To that end, last Thursday ​I published an op-ed in The New York Times​ calling on Congress to begin a public fact-finding mission to uncover what research projects OpenAI and Anthropic are conducting, how they’re conducting them, and for what purposes.

I suggested three key areas to explore with this questioning:

“We need to stop letting a small number of private companies, acting and talking in increasingly erratic ways, dictate how we’re supposed to feel about A.I.,” I concluded. “We’ve heard what they want to say; now it’s Congress’s turn to step in on our behalf to find out what’s really going on.”