AI firms must be clear on risks or repeat tobacco’s mistakes, says Anthropic chief
Artificial intelligence companies must be transparent about the risks posed by their products or risk repeating the mistakes of tobacco and opioid companies, according to the chief executive of the AI startup Anthropic.Dario Amodei, who runs the US company behind the Claude chatbot, said he believed AI will become smarter than “most or all humans in most or all ways” and urged his peers to “call it as you see it”.Speaking to CBS News, Amodei said a lack of transparency about the impact of powerful AI would replay the errors of cigarette and opioid firms that failed to raise a red flag over the potential health damage of their own products.“You could end up in the world of, like, the cigarette companies, or the opioid companies, where they knew there were dangers, and they didn’t talk about them, and certainly did not prevent them,” he said.Amodei warned this year that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs – office jobs such as accountancy, law and banking – within five years.
“Without intervention, it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be some significant job impact there,And my worry is that it will be broad and it’ll be faster than what we’ve seen with previous technology,” Amodei said,Anthropic, whose CEO is a prominent voice for online safety, has flagged various concerns about its AI models recently, including an apparent awareness that they are being tested and attempting to commit blackmail,Last week it said its coding tool, Claude Code, was used by a Chinese state-sponsored group to attack 30 entities around the world in September, achieving a “handful of successful intrusions”,“One of the things that’s been powerful in a positive way about the models is their ability to kind of act on their own,” said Amodei.
“But the more autonomy we give these systems, you know, the more we can worry are they doing exactly the things that we want them to do?”Logan Graham, the head of Anthropic’s team for stress testing AI models, told CBS that the flipside of a model’s ability to find health breakthroughs could be helping to build a biological weapon.Sign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningafter newsletter promotion“If the model can help make a biological weapon, for example, that’s usually the same capabilities that the model could use to help make vaccines and accelerate therapeutics,” he said.Referring to autonomous models, which are viewed as a key part of the investment case for AI, Graham said users want to an AI tool to help their business – not wreck it.“You want a model to go build your business and make you a billion,” he said.“But you don’t want to wake up one day and find that it’s also locked you out of the company, for example.
And so our sort of basic approach to it is, we should just start measuring these autonomous capabilities and to run as many weird experiments as possible and see what happens,”
It’s not all about roasting on an open fire – there’s so much more you can do with chestnuts
If I’d ever spared a thought for how chestnuts – the sweet, edible kind, not the combative horsey sort – were harvested, I would probably have conjured rosy-cheeked peasants bent low in ancient forests and filling rough-hewn hessian sacks by hand. Back-breaking labour, sure, but so picturesque!I was delighted, therefore, while on a writing retreat in Umbria last month, to get the opportunity to watch an elderly couple manoeuvre a giant vacuum around their haphazard orchard, followed by their furious sheepdog. The fallen crop was sucked into a giant fan that spat their bristly jackets back out on to the ground, and the nuts then went to be sorted by other family members on a conveyor belt in the barn – the good ones to be sold in the shell, the less perfect specimens swiftly dropped into a bucket for processing.Later in the week, a lorry turned up in the village square to pick up bags from other small local producers, and that evening I roasted a pan of chestnuts on the fire with new appreciation, while loudly bemoaning the disappearance from the streets of London of the chestnut sellers of my childhood (though this makes me sound positively Dickensian, I can confirm that I’m talking about this century. Note also that Nigel Slater is less starry-eyed on the subject
Benjamina Ebuehi’s recipe for apple, brown butter and oat loaf | The sweet spot
I adore a good loaf cake. There’s something about them that’s just inherently cosy and wholesome, and this one in particular is perfect for the colder months, not least because it’s simple and sturdy in the very best way. It’d be right at home with a coffee for breakfast, as well as gently warmed in a pan with butter and served with hot custard on a rainy evening. A real all-rounder.Prep 5 min Cook 1 hr 25 min Serves 8180g unsalted butter 200g light muscovado sugar 2 large eggs 50g soured cream 210g plain flour ½ tsp cinnamon 40g porridge oats, plus extra to finish1½ tsp baking powder ¼ tsp salt 2 eating apples 2 tbsp demerara sugarHeat the oven to 180C (160C fan)/350F/gas 4 and grease and line a 2lb loaf tin
Kids have a wobble in the face of rabbit jelly | Brief letters
I sympathise with Tim Dowling and the challenges of releasing blancmange from a rabbit mould (Jelly’s back! Here are three worth making – and three that should wobble off to the bin, 12 November). My mistake was adding chopped pineapple to the jelly mix, with the resulting jelly looking as though we were seeing the undigested contents of a rabbit’s stomach. My children refused to eat it.Dee ReidTwyford, Berkshire Tim Dowling has missed out one important ingredient from his otherwise commendable recipe for blancmange rabbit: the two sultanas you stick on for the eyes.Jane GregoryEmsworth, Hampshire Regarding concerns over Epstein Road in Thamesmead (Letters, 12 November), spare a thought for those unfortunate residents of Savile Row in central London
Think autumn, think Piedmont – wine from ‘the foot of the mountain’
By the time this column comes out, it will be Big Coat weather, so those collars will be getting higher and the scarves thicker. And, when there’s a chill in the air, I like to eat food than leans towards smoky and earthy flavours: charred vegetables, stews, sausages and mushroom everything.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more
‘I’m now a one-issue voter’: US shoppers fear Italian pasta tariff will cause shortage
On Monday night, Kelly planned to make dinner and spend the night inside with her family. Instead, she told her husband to put the kids to bed so she could get in the car, drive to Wegmans and “panic buy” $100 worth of Rummo pasta.Kelly, a 42-year-old product manager who lives outside Philadelphia, has celiac disease, which means that eating gluten triggers an immune response that leads to digestive issues. She saw fellow gluten-free people on Reddit and TikTok freaking out over the fact that the US is mulling a 107% tariff on Italian pasta imports. According to the Wall Street Journal, the hike could lead to those companies withdrawing from the US market as early as January
Jimi Famurewa’s recipe for puff-puff pancakes
Efteling is a fairytale-themed, 73-year-old amusement park in the south of the Netherlands that, after two consecutive years of visits, has become an acute obsession among my family. We love the vaguely folk-horror animatronic trees, witches and giant sea monsters lurking within a labyrinthine real forest. We love the anthropomorphised talking bins that plead (in a haunting, perpetual sing-song) for crumpled pieces of paper to be shoved into their suction-powered mouths. We love the inventive rides that, variously, judder along rattling wooden tracks, plunge cursed pirate ships into water, or nudge gondolas serenely through sylvan scenes of bum-flashing goblins showering beneath waterfalls.But our very favourite thing about the place might well be the poffertjes stand, a perennially busy kiosk where exhausted families gather for dinky paper boats filled with these yeast-puffed and sugar-dusted miniature buckwheat pancakes that are a Dutch institution
AI firm claims it stopped Chinese state-sponsored cyber-attack campaign
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AI slop tops Billboard and Spotify charts as synthetic music spreads
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EU investigates Google over ‘demotion’ of commercial content from news media
Anthropic announces $50bn plan for datacenter construction in US