Jack Clark, co-founder and Head of Public Benefit at Anthropic, has said a 'kill switch' might be needed to prevent artificial intelligence from going haywire. His comments follow multiple warnings, including from Nobel prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, who said there is a '10 percent chance' AI could 'kill all humans' in the next decade.
Warnings from AI leaders
Hinton's warning came after Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic employee who resigned over his fears, said the technology could end civilisation as we know it by 2036. This led to the bosses of the three major American AI firms — OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, and Grok's Elon Musk — to agree that external 'reviewers' should be installed at 'frontier' AI firms.
Now, Clark has told the BBC that a 'kill switch' might be necessary. He asked: "Should you mandate for companies to definitely have a kill switch? Is that kill switch verifiable by a third party?" He added: "I think that's the kind of thing society is going to want to know and might want to eventually pass rules around."
Regulation and political response
When pressed on whether AI had a chance of killing humanity, Clark said he didn't 'think these statistics are that useful', though he added that allowing AI to continue 'totally unregulated' was a bad idea.
In the US, politicians have proposed the Kill Switch Act, which would require companies to have a way to shut down problematic AI tools. However, President Donald Trump has said he believes claims AI could take over the world are a 'hoax', potentially stopping the Kill Switch Act in its tracks.
UK government rejects kill switch
In the UK, the government rejected the idea of introducing a kill switch for British-developed AI models only three days ago.
