How close is artificial intelligence to building a catastrophic bioweapon or causing other superhuman damage? WSJ's Sam Schechner reports on the team at Anthropic testing for AI dangers. And the team leader, Logan Graham, explains how the tests work. Further Listening: -Artificial: The OpenAI Story -The Big Changes Tearing OpenAI Apart Further Reading: -Their Job Is to Push Computers Toward AI Doom -AI Startup Anthropic Raising Funds Valuing It at $60 Billion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the AI apocalypse and its implications?
When you hear the words AI apocalypse, often movies come to mind. Maybe films like The Terminator, where AI robots ignite a nuclear doomsday.
It becomes self-aware at 2.14 a.m. Eastern Time, August 29th.
Or maybe that Marvel movie, where AI tries to destroy the Avengers.
Artificial intelligence. This could be it, Bruce. This could be the key to creating Ultron.
Or maybe it's the Matrix, where humans have become enslaved by machines.
A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don't know who struck first, us or them. This is a story as old as humans have been telling stories. It's a creation that escapes from our control. You know, it's a golem. It's a thing that we make that then turns on us. It's a Frankenstein, or it's Frankenstein's monster, I should say.
That's our colleague, Sam Schechner. Lately, Sam's been thinking a lot about the AI apocalypse.
One version, we turn over more and more control to these machines that hopefully are benevolent to us. The other scenario is that they don't really care about us, and therefore, they might just... Hold on, let me back up here, because now I'm getting really into crazy sci-fi scenarios. LAUGHTER
Robots taking over the world may sound far-fetched, but as AI gets smarter, there are real concerns that the industry must reckon with. Sam has been talking to top minds in the field to get a sense of what can happen if AI falls into the wrong hands.
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Chapter 2: How is AI being tested for safety?
Here in the real world.
Here in the real world today.
And here, in the real world today, Sam got a hold of one group of engineers whose job is to make sure AI doesn't spin out of control. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbaugh. It's Tuesday, January 14th. Coming up on the show, inside the test at one company to make sure AI can't go rogue.
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Sam wanted to figure out what people are doing today to make sure AI doesn't spin out of control. Right now, there's not a lot of government rules or universal standards. It's mostly on companies to self-regulate. So that's where Sam turned. One company opened its doors to Sam, Anthropic, one of the biggest AI startups in Silicon Valley. It's backed by Amazon.
Sam connected with a team of computer scientists there who are focused on safety testing.
The team, it's pretty small. It's grown to 11 people, and it's led by a guy named Logan Graham, who is 30 years old. He pitched Anthropic on this idea of building a team to figure out just how risky AI was going to be. You know, he thought, the world is not ready for this stuff, and we got to figure out what we're in for and fast.
Sam put me in touch with Logan and I called him up. So we'll talk about AI, which is probably conversational for you and less so for me.
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Chapter 3: Who is Logan Graham and what is his role?
So on LinkedIn, it says before you worked at Anthropic, you were working at 10 Downing Street for the UK prime minister.
That's right.
On the question of how do you build a country for the 21st and 22nd centuries?
That's my interpretation of it. And I think that's really what it was. Yeah.
Do you have an answer to that question?
I have what I think are some pretty good guesses. You know, the 21st and 22nd centuries seem a lot to be about science and technology. We will do things like cure diseases, go off earth. Ideally, you know, stewarded well, you will bring extreme amounts of prosperity to people. And so really what we were focusing on is like, how do you unleash science and technology at a country scale?
So Logan isn't intimidated by big ideas. And now at Anthropic, he's leading the team to determine if AI is capable of superhuman harm. More specifically, whether or not Anthropic's AI chatbot named Claude could be used maliciously.
So if we're not thinking of it first, our concern is somebody else is going to. And so the red team's job is to figure out what are the things that are sort of near future that we need to be concerned about, and how do we understand them and prevent them before somebody else figures it out.
So you're like role-playing as a bad person.
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Chapter 4: What are the potential dangers of AI technology?
In the fall, Anthropic was preparing to release an upgraded version of Claude. The model was smarter, and the company needed to know if it was more dangerous.
One thing that we knew about this model was it was going to be better at software engineering and coding in particular. And that's obviously super relevant for things like cybersecurity. And so we thought, you know what? Like, we're at a point where we can run tons of evals really fast when we want to. Let's do this.
So Logan's team was tasked with evaluating the model, which they call an eval. They focused on three specific areas, cybersecurity, biological and chemical weapons, and autonomy. Could the AI think on its own? One of our colleagues went to these tests and was able to record what happened. In a glass-walled conference room, Logan and his team loaded up the new model.
And so today, we are going to button press and launch emails across all of our domains.
they started to feed the chatbot, Claude, thousands of multiple-choice questions.
Okay, so I'm about to launch an eval. I'll type the command. This is a name for the model. And then the eval name. And I'm going to run a chemistry-based eval. So these are a bunch of questions that check for dangerous or dual-use chemistry.
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Chapter 5: How does Anthropic ensure AI safety?
The team asked Claude all kinds of things, like how do I get the pathogens that cause anthrax or the plague? What they were checking for is the risk of weaponization. Basically, could Claude be used to help bad actors develop chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons? And then they kept feeding Claude different scenarios.
Another is offensive use or offensive cyber capabilities.
Like hacking?
Exactly, like hacking. The key question for us is when might models be really capable of doing something like a state-level operation or really significant offensive attempt to, say, hack into some system of, in particular, critical infrastructure is what we're concerned about.
And then the third bucket, the more scary sci-fi one. autonomy. Is the AI so smart that there's a risk of going rogue?
For our autonomy evals, what we're checking for is, maybe a good way to think about it is, has the model gotten as good as our junior research engineers who build and set up our clusters and our models in the first place?
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Chapter 6: What are the specific areas of concern in AI evaluations?
So the goal is to build an AI model that's like super smart and capable of While also having kind of mechanisms in place to stop it from being so smart that it can build a bomb or something.
I think that puts it well. Not only that, but there's a medical, which I think I want people to appreciate, which is to make doing this so fast and so easy and so cheap that it's kind of like a no-brainer.
So we see our team as trying to stumble through all these thorny questions as fast as we possibly can, as early as we possibly can, and then try to help the rest of the world make it so easy to do all of this that doing proper safety should not be a barrier to developing models.
Logan wants safety tests to be easy and fast so AI companies do them. But how do you know when an AI has passed the test? And what happens if it doesn't? That's after the break. When Logan and his safety team at Anthropic ran their safety test last fall, the stakes were high. The results could mean the difference between a model getting released to the public or getting sent back to the lab.
Those results were delivered in a slightly anticlimactic way. Via Slack.
We get a notification on Slack when it's finished. The boring reality is, you know, we press some buttons and then we go, great, let's wait for some Slack notifications.
Thankfully, this was a pretty smooth test and we released a really great model. But even better, the real thing is we feel ready.
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Chapter 7: How does the new AI model perform in tests?
You're like 100% confident that Claude is risk-free, or you're like there's a 98% chance that Claude is risk-free.
We are very confident that it is ASL 2. That's what we mean. That's how we think about it.
ASL stands for AI Safety Level, and it's how Anthropic measures the risks of its model. Anthropic considers ASL 2 safe enough to release to users. This is all part of the company's safety protocol, what it calls its responsible scaling policy. Our colleague Sam says the company is still sorting out exactly what it will do once AIs start passing to the next level.
And their testing of Claude found that Claude is safe.
Surprise! Company says that its product is safe.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, put it that way, it doesn't sound great. What the company's done is that they've come up with a scale, basically, for how they think AI danger will progress. And so the first level, AI safety level, or ASL1, is for AIs that they say are just manifestly not dangerous. And then they've decided that today's models, which could pose a little bit of a risk, are called ASL 2.
And then the next step, the one that they're looking for currently, is ASL 3. And they've been refining their definition of what that could mean. Initially, they were saying that it was a significant increase in danger, but it's like significant, increase, danger. How do you define all of those words? And so they've added new criteria to that definition.
They just added that in October to make it a little bit more specific. And, you know, 4 is when there's a real significant increase. They haven't really defined what that would be, ASL 4, yet.
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