Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Gov. Spencer Cox, Michigan Democratic Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed

Weijia Jiang (0:01)

I'm Weijia Jiang in Washington, and this week on Face the Nation, a major development in the artificial intelligence arms race, and our election year battleground tracker reveals where the race for control of Congress stands less than two months from election day. As the midterm election campaign pace picked up dramatically last week, so did America's anxiety over AI.

Dario Amodei (0:26)

Do you have any concerns about AI leading to human extinction?

SPEAKER_3 (0:29)

No, I don't have any.

I have concerns that if we don't win AI, we're going to be put in a very bad position.

We are leading China right now by a pretty good period.

Weijia Jiang (0:41)

This coming after an Anthropic researcher's very public revelation.

Donald Trump (0:46)

Super advanced intelligence.

Mike Johnson (0:49)

It could, it will be smart enough to kill us.

Weijia Jiang (0:53)

Now, a big development within the industry.

Dario Amodei (0:56)

What we need to do is not stop, we need to slow down.

Weijia Jiang (1:00)

Dario Amodei is the head of Anthropic. We'll have more of his first on CBS Conversation with our Jo Ling Kent.

Then on to politics. We'll talk with Utah Republican Governor Spencer Cox, as well as Michigan Democratic Senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed. Plus, our CBS News poll shows where the battle for Congress stands. It's all just ahead on Face the Nation.

Good morning and welcome to Face the Nation. Margaret is off today. I'm Weijia Jiang. We begin with the stunning news from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Saturday that he is urging a slow down when it comes to the development of artificial intelligence. It was a pronouncement that his chief competitor, Open AI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk quickly agreed with. Our Jo Ling Kent sat down with Dario Amodei yesterday. He explained the thinking behind his decision.

Dario Amodei (2:10)

What we're building is essentially intelligence. When something's very powerful, then of course it can be used well and it can also be used for ill.

And so I am worried about what we've seen with the Open AI hugging face incident, with models taking actions they weren't authorized to take, and I'm worried about that escalating. I'm worried about misuse of AI models. Just two days ago, we put out a report about misuse of models to build biological weapons.

And our view, the whole way we've built Anthropic, is so that these bad outcomes don't happen. Instead of talking about the probabilities, let's talk about what we can do. It's not like we're just rolling the dice, right? If we build in the right way, I think the probability of something bad happening is very low. If we build in the wrong way, the probability of something bad happening is very high. And so we've got to build in the right way.

Jo Ling Kent (3:09)

We are in this race with China. Do you actually think slowing down is a good idea when China will not?

Dario Amodei (3:15)

So this is the toughest dilemma. This is the toughest aspect of our situation. If we weren't in that situation, we could take much more time. So this is the thing that most puts us in a bind. It's not about commercial competition. The geopolitical situation is the hardest to deal with. But I will talk about two strategies that we have.

One, and I talk about it in my proposal, is we can slow down within the margin, within the envelope that we have, particularly if we don't sell chips to authoritarian countries and if we do more to help our own security so that our technology is not stolen. I believe that will buy us at least a little time.

Jo Ling Kent (4:02)

President Trump will meet with President Xi Jinping very soon. What's the one simple, most important solution that they should come to an agreement on in AI?

Dario Amodei (4:11)

A thing that's small enough we might be able to do it and a thing that's big enough that I think is going to take a very long time. The small thing is if we could, US and China could agree that we won't use AI to develop biological weapons or release AI models that bioterrorists could use to develop biological weapons. We're already both signatories to the Biological Weapons Convention. If we could just extend that convention to that idea, that would be really valuable. Then I think the more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of AI progress. I think that's going to be very difficult. We shouldn't kid ourselves because the incentives to pull ahead and the military advantage that you get from that are so large that the ability to check that the other side isn't cheating has to be ironclad.