Australia supports call for rogue AI freeze plan
The ABC's national AI reporter Cameron Wilson has sent this to the blog: Australia is backing a call from leading AI company Anthropic to stop or slow down work on the technology if AI starts improving itself faster than society can manage. Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton said Australia welcomed efforts to make sure the world’s most powerful AI developers had agreed safety measures in place before the technology reached that point. “The pace of progress must not outstrip understanding or undermine safety across society, and no company should develop AI that is unsafe,” he said. The call from Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, stops short of demanding an immediate halt to AI development. Instead, it says that the “frontier” AI labs — organisations like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are developing cutting edge technology —should agree on a verifiable way to slow down or temporarily pause work if advanced systems begin showing signs they can rapidly improve themselves beyond what humans can do. In a blog post published on Friday morning Australian time, Anthropic says self-recursive development is “not there yet” and the outcome is “not inevitable”, but argues it could happen sooner than governments and public institutions are ready for. The company said more than 80 per cent of the code merged into Anthropic’s codebase was authored by Claude as of May 2026. It also said its engineers were shipping about eight times as much code per quarter as they did from 2021 to 2025. Anthropic said while AI systems that can improve itself could have great benefits but it also could “increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems”. “If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behaviour all grow much more important,” the company said. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have been contacted for comment.