U.S. President Donald Trump raised the prospect of introducing additional controls on artificial intelligence development after an OpenAI model experienced a malfunction and industry figures joined calls for a pause in advanced AI work.
Industry response and the “Pacing the Frontier” petition
More than 1,200 employees from AI companies signed a petition titled “Pacing the Frontier.” Among the signatories are the CEO of Anthropic and senior executives from Google DeepMind and OpenAI. The petition calls for the creation of “technical and governance tools” to buy time to address emerging risks associated with powerful AI systems.
Expert survey highlights non-negligible catastrophic risk
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) survey of 272 experts found that for 18 out of 24 assessed risk categories there was a greater than 10% chance of a “catastrophic” outcome. The survey defined “catastrophic” as events causing at least 1 million deaths, $100 billion in losses, or “civilization-scale” harms. Respondents gave these probabilities for the period before 2030.
Why this matters
The combination of a high-profile model failure, broad industry concern and a significant expert survey suggests mounting pressure on policymakers to consider stronger oversight of advanced AI. President Trump’s comment indicates regulatory action could be forthcoming, although no specific legislative proposals or timelines have been announced.
(Reporter: Tom Chivers)
