Over the past year, concerns have swirled over the potential dangers posed by artificial intelligence, and debates have raged over the proper path for AI safety. Now, Anthropic appears to have put forth its own vision for how the government might regulate its industry.
Those scenarios involve a “foreseeable, imminent risk” — one in which over 50 people are at risk of dying or if over a billion dollars in property damage could result, Politico writes. The catastrophic risk in question must “stem from the creation or release of a biological weapon, the model evading its developer’s controls or a cyberattack,” the outlet notes.
Anthropic’s bill suggests that analysis of a model’s potential for disaster could be arrived at via the use of “independent evaluators” who would be registered with the U.S. Commerce Department. These evaluators could potentially be paid by the AI labs themselves — so long as the “payment is not contingent on the evaluations’ results,” Politico writes.
In Anthropic’s draft bill, when evaluators determine that an imminent catastrophic risk is posed, they would have 72 hours to contact the Commerce Department about it. The Commerce Department would then have to request to a Washington, D.C., judge a halt to the model’s release. The legislation would expressly forbid any federal agency from having the discretion to halt the model’s distribution on its own, Politico writes.
In an effort to present a solution to the spectacle of crisis that the labs themselves have helped bring about, companies like Anthropic have offered up their own preferred solutions.