Frontline ·
AI’s atom bomb moment?
The AI revolution raises questions about ownership, labour and access as a few firms control technology built on collective human knowledge.
Late in 1944, a Polish physicist named Joseph Rotblat packed his bags and left Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project’s laboratory and the birthplace of the atomic bomb. He had joined the project to build the atomic bomb because, like many scientists then, he feared Hitler would build one first. When it became clear that Germany was nowhere close, he saw no reason to stay. He was the only scientist known to have left the Manhattan Project on ethical grounds. The bomb was built anyway, and it fell on Hiroshima the following August. Rotblat spent the rest of his life speaking up against the bomb. He was the youngest signatory of the 1955 manifesto in which Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein asked scientists to “remember your humanity, and forget the rest”, and in 1995 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the Pugwash Conference. Rotblat was 36 when he left the Manhattan Project.
Last week, 27-year-old Jacob Coxon, a British researcher, walked out of Anthropic, the AI giant that develops the Claude family of large language models (LLMs). Coxon spent three years training LLMs, first at OpenAI and then at Anthropic, and on September 8, he wrote on X that neither company was acting responsibly; they were, he said, “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”.
Evan Hubinger, an alignment science lead at Anthropic, responded to Coxon’s concerns saying he would put the odds of AI killing everyone within a decade at more than 10 per cent. On September 12, Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, published an essay asking the industry to “pace the frontier”, and the heads of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and xAI said they agreed.
