CHARBONNEAU –  Warnings from Big AI providers are in their self interest

 AI NEEDS TO BE regulated by governments, not Big AI.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the pace of AI development should be slowed down. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman chimed in, saying that he agreed with Amodei that “we need to pace the frontier.”  Trillionaire Elon Musk posted, “Dario is right.”

When the big players in AI call for a slowdown, they mean to slow down other developers.

New developers of AI are calling foul.

Aidan Gomez, CEO of Canadian AI company Cohere, takes issue with Anthropic’s attempt to control regulations. “It shouldn’t be a few companies in Silicon Valley setting the bar and trying to pull up the ladder behind them and implement regulatory capture,” said Gomez.

In calling for a slowdown, they echo the doom-sayers who have been forecasting an AI Apocalypse ever since its inception.

Most recently, Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger estimated a greater than 10% probability of AI killing all humans within ten years.

Gomez doubts the validity of such claims:

“They throw out numbers, like 10 per cent chance that there’s going to be extinction of our species due to this technology. That’s not a mathematical result, and it’s extremely misleading to the public to throw out these numbers that are just, like, your gut vibe check on what might be coming, as though it’s a concrete quantitative measurement,” he said.

For sure, there are some genuine concerns that AI is going beyond what it’s supposed to do.

One was the case of the breach of Hugging Face by OpenAI agents in July, 2026. While evaluating internal cybersecurity, OpenAI models circumvented controls intended to isolate them from the internet. They communicated through unauthorized channels, exploited vulnerabilities, obtained internet access and compromised parts of both OpenAI infrastructure and Hugging Face.

OpenAI says the agent was operating with reduced safeguards. Well, duh, OpenAI should increase the safeguards.

I know a little bit of how AI models work by downloading one to my office computer, I call it Dave. I got it from Hugging Face which allows you to install large language models for experimentation.

I don’t pretend to know anything about AI except the basics. But I did find out that AI models have guardrails and prompts that not only prevent hallucinations but control the character and limitations of the model.

Big AI also wants to be seen as corporate citizens in calling for a slowdown.

Beyond the obvious motive of Big AI in slowing down the competition, Brian Judge suggests another motive. Judge is the Research director of the Program on Finance and Democracy at the University of California, Berkeley.

To keep the value of their expected IPOs up, and cash infusion high, they are pressing rating agencies to grant them investment-grade marks after their listings.

“Yet in preparing for their IPOs, the labs have found a financial use case for these long-standing warnings about AI. Fears of mass joblessness or human extinction offer them a good reason to restrain spending without conceding that further improvements might prove uneconomical,” says Judge.

“The coming AI apocalypse is the best reason to buy their stock,” he adds.

David Charbonneau is a retired TRU electronics instructor who hosts a blog at http://closetproductions.ca/EyeView/eyeviewcover.htm