On a Friday in late February, Dario Amodei sat contemplating the fate of his five-year-old company. It was the end of a surreal week for Anthropic, even by the standards of an extraordinary few months for the AI start-up that was speeding ahead of its rivals to develop cutting-edge systems. A bitter public clash had erupted with the US Department of Defense over a principle at the core of the company’s founding: the safe deployment of powerful AI technologies.
2月下旬的一个星期五,达里奥•阿莫代伊(Dario Amodei)坐在那里,思索着这家成立五年的公司的命运。对Anthropic而言,这是超现实一周的尾声,即便放在这家人工智能初创企业过去几个月的非凡表现中来看也是如此——Anthropic正加速超越竞争对手,研发最前沿的系统。它与美国国防部(US Department of Defense)之间爆发了一场激烈的公开冲突,争议焦点是公司创立之初确立的一项核心原则:如何安全部署强大的人工智能技术。