Exclusive: Anthropic CEO calls for stronger regulation of AI

AI has advanced at an exponential pace, and Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the handful of the world's most important AI companies, is calling for stronger regulation of the technology -- including government intervention.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Amodei said that AI needs to be developed with the proper guardrails to ensure it has a positive impact on the world.

"We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology," he said.

"We have to figure out how to make this technology reliably," Amodei said. "But the onus primarily falls on us."

Amodei's comments follow a letter he wrote Wednesday warning that AI safety measures are out of step with AI's rapid progress and saying the government "should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks."

In a proposal released with his essay, Amodei announced a $200 million investment into research on AI impact on society.

In terms of the impact on jobs, Amodei told ABC News that the employment market has always recovered after technological innovations, but this time intervention may be necessary to help the public in the short- and long-term.

"There are these concepts around wage reinsurance, retention incentives to encourage companies not to lay off people, improvements to unemployment insurance. These are things to help people through a bumpy but relatively usual transition," he said.

"In the meantime, we need to talk about kind of longer-term economic support, and we could imagine things like raising the capital gains tax, imagine things like taxes on AI companies or the corporate tax in general," he added.

When asked about a statement Anthropic released last week about taking a pause due to the technology being almost able to develop itself, Amodei said that countries and AI labs would all have to agree to a pause for such a move to be effective.

"I would like to clarify," Amodei said. "My point is that we should be willing to at least try."

"It would have to be the case that all of the relevant AI players, including geopolitical adversaries, would have agree to it, and it would have be verifiable," he added.

Amodei noted that he did not believe China would be a responsible actor with an AI pause.

"I don't trust China at all," Amodei said.

"Imagine if China had built Mythos," Amodei said, referring to the large language model unveiled by Anthropic earlier this year that was developed to discover software vulnerabilities.

"They would have used it to attack us. They would have used to help Russia in Ukraine. They might have used it to help Iran. They may have used this to help North Korea. Who knows what they would have done with it?," he added.

During testing, Claude Mythos was able to exploit thousands of bugs and software defects in major operating systems and browsers online, but it was never widely released to the public.

This program, Amodei now argues, led him to believe that AI models should be regulated globally.

Amodei, however, remained optimistic about AI's impact on humanity and its ability, for instance, to cure medical maladies.

"I think that AI could cure many of the diseases that have plagued humanity for centuries or millennia," Amodei said.

"I used to be a biologist. Biology is incredibly complicated," he added. "AI has an incredible ability to draw connections between a wide variety of disparate information, and I think that's exactly what we need for biomedical advancement."