The latest controversy over the potentially dangerous uses of artificial intelligence (AI) focuses on the field of technology and its application to military weaponry.
As published by Forbes, the company Anthropic, responsible for the AI assistant Claude, has banned initiatives that -possibly- intended to use its model to create biological weapons, the company announced this Thursday, revealing the findings of an investigation just a few days after “artificial intelligence experts warned about the potential of increasingly powerful digital assistants to cause the extinction of humanity”.
The company indicated in a report that it detected and blocked these improper uses during this year, although it could not determine whether the studies had legitimate or malicious purposes, so it chose to block them due to the risk that its models could contribute to the development of dangerous pathogens.
“While the assessments are useful because they provide evidence of capability, they cannot concretely prove that such capability would ever be used to develop biological weapons in the real world,” the company explained in the document.
So far, the California corporation denied having knowledge that any private company has publicly shared “evidence of possible misuse of their platforms for the development of biological weapons”.
Anthropic also included in another statement an extensive list of cases detected in the last eight months in which its AI models had been misused, including Claude, in China, Russia, and Yemen.
This report arises amid growing concerns from experts in the technology sector about the dual use of AI, since models capable of assisting in biological research can also serve dangerous activities, as well as voices warning about the dangers arising from the increasing autonomy of these models.
The technology company assured it has developed detection systems to identify and block uses that may pose a risk in its AI models.
Yesterday it was published that an Anthropic researcher is leaving the artificial intelligence industry for fear that the lab and its competitors are competing to build systems that will not be able to be controlled, a sign of growing concern about safety within the leading AI companies.