Anthropic’s Jeff Bleich on AI safety and democracy

In this episode of our TSD Artificial Intelligence Masterclass, Politico Australia's Ryan Heath interviews Anthropic International Special Envoy, Jeff Bleich.

AI safety was a key theme of the interview. And continued a common theme from the frontier labs of proactively seeking government intervention into the sector, vastly different to the social media pioneers who demanded government stay out of their business. Jeff says that ideally pacing frontier AI doesn’t just mean preventing the AI capability from getting too far ahead of safety but not ahead at all. 

Jeff and Ryan talk about recent AI cyber incidents, which Jeff says should be acted upon quickly but not through an alarmed panic, and rather as a healthy wake up call.

Jeff talks about the need to have the frontier companies and governments working closely to work out what reasonable regulation is, including published safety plans and independent evaluators.

Jeff also talks about the importance of developing AI consistent with democratic principles, and that means not only examining our own settings but needing to work out what our adversaries would seek to do with AI to harm us.