The industry wants AI to slow down. What does this mean for IT pros?

AI is evolving faster than you can say “Jack Robinson,” and some AI leaders want to change that.

On Sept. 12, Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei penned an essay calling for the broader AI industry to slow its pace of development. In his essay, Amodei shared a “three-step plan” to do so, which recommends:

• Embedding third-party evaluators (e.g., METR) within leading frontier organizations to report safety incidents and verify safety commitments are being met
• Collaboration among frontier AI companies within democratic countries “to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress”
• Cooperation with authoritarian governments to achieve global regulation

“I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,” Amodei wrote.

Amodei’s essay—which came shortly after several AI researchers voiced their concerns about how AI could threaten humanity—was met with agreement by other leaders in the AI space, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

Fast and furious. AI leaders aren’t the only ones concerned about the pace at which this technology is driving change. According to an ABBYY report, six in 10 US companies said AI is being adopted quicker than their enterprises can govern it. A September Ernst & Young report also found that almost half (47%) of US AI leaders admit that their organization has previously “bypassed its AI governance process for urgent deployments.”

Slow your roll. IT leaders may be in agreement that things are moving too fast, but what would a slowdown mean at the enterprise level? Emilie Schario, VP of engineering at Anaconda, told IT Brew that it’s unclear what a slowdown would look like in practice.

“Does that mean we’re going to stop building new models? Does that mean we’re going to add some regulation?” Schario said. “I couldn’t tell you because I don’t think people are even agreeing on what ‘slowdown’ means?”

However, regardless of the form a slowdown takes, she said it would give organizations behind on their AI adoption journey an opportunity to get up to speed: “Now is your opportunity to leverage what may or may not be a slowdown to try to catch up.”

ArmorCode CEO Nikhil Gupta added that organizations who moved too fast when deploying AI also have the opportunity to go back and extract more value from it in a secure manner.

“This is the time for IT and enterprises to ensure they are having all the guardrails and they are better equipped to move faster,” Gupta said. “Sometimes, you have to go slow to go fast.”