Anthropic on Wednesday joined growing calls for the artificial intelligence industry to find ways to cushion people from the technology’s disruptions, announcing an initial $200 million investment to research AI’s impact on jobs and the economy.
Alongside new policy proposals from the maker of the Claude chatbot, Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei published an essay on his personal website that expanded on his position that the government should promise economic support for those financially impacted by AI. The technology could produce much larger disruptions to the labour market than previous technological advancements, Amodei wrote, and those disruptions could last longer.
“The key challenge in such a world won’t be incentivising growth, but finding a way for everyone to share in the benefits,” Amodei wrote.
The announcement comes on the heels of Anthropic rival OpenAI on Monday outlining goals that included ensuring gains from the technology are “widely shared”. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently met with Sen Bernie Sanders to discuss a plan for the public to take an ownership stake in artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI, using their stock to create a public wealth fund that would spread the fortune generated by AI behemoths.
In the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Donald Trump told reporters that he will soon meet with executives from several leading AI companies to discuss “giving back” to the public.
“We’re talking about giving back something to the public, and if we do that, the public will become very rich,” Trump said. “I think they’ll do that, and I think it’ll make it very popular.”
In his essay, Amodei said he has warned of job displacement not because he is “trying to be a prophet of doom” but because he wants “both policymakers and the private sector to have the best chance to adapt and respond”.
He proposed better data collection to track AI job displacement, pro-employment policy incentives to slow or reduce displacement and “mechanisms such as universal basic income” if job displacement more permanently drives down labour demand.
That universal basic income could be financed through taxes on “relevant companies” or by raising the capital gains tax, Amodei wrote.
Scant details were available Wednesday about the $200 million commitment from Anthropic, but the company said it will go to what it calls an Economic Futures Research Fund that will back research trials and “program evaluation” on public policies it deems promising. The company is also establishing a $150 million national fellowship program it says will help early-career professionals “extend the benefits of AI to communities across America”.
Anthropic and OpenAI each recently announced they were moving toward initial public offerings of shares, following Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, which is pitching itself as an AI-focused space company as it prepares to go public.
The economic policy framework Anthropic proposed Wednesday set recommendations for how the US government could respond to three levels of economic disruption caused by AI: one in which the national unemployment rate reaches 5 per cent, 10 per cent and an unspecified, “unprecedented” level. The latest unemployment rate, reported last week, was 4.3 per cent.
In the “unprecedented” scenario, the company wrote that more permanent support will be necessary, and it listed several ways to generate and share revenue broadly, including basic income, sovereign wealth models and equity-sharing mechanisms. This would be “novel economic territory”, the company wrote.
The company’s proposals also outlined several suggestions for mitigating safety and security risks. Anthropic is known for its emphasis on safety and building reliable, “steerable” AI systems, with Amodei and its co-founders splitting off from OpenAI to form the new company in 2021.
The proposals add that the government should be able to “block or deter” the rollout of AI models that “pose a significant risk of catastrophic harms”.
Amodei wrote that AI regulations should match the rigor of Federal Aviation Administration regulations in that AI models would be required to go through technical testing and auditing like airplanes. They wouldn’t be released if they didn’t meet high safety standards.
Last week, Trump signed an executive order on AI oversight that established a framework for the government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release.
Amodei added existing regulations for aircraft, automobiles and drugs should serve as models for regulating AI. They are all “powerful technologies essential to the modern economy”, he wrote, “but capable of killing large numbers of people if designed or operated poorly.
