Why was this not a thing BEFORE continuing to develop AI? Makes me think that if they actually believed in AI causing extinction, they would have already had a kill switch.
Not if the extinction happens after they're dead. Then they wouldn't feel obligated to do so because it won't affect them. Instead, speaking hypothetically, if they truly believed that AI would cause extinction, then they would only implement the kill switch sufficiently many others believed it and they could claim plausible deniability for not truly understanding what AI would become.
** Note that I'm not claiming that AI will cause extinction, just continuing your hypothetical reasoning.
It’s also not happening. They’re saying that because they need to somehow explain how there’s synergy between their space side and their Grok side. It doesn’t work, but that doesn’t matter to investors as long as they don’t actually do it.
You can shoot them. But also, you can just stop sending them to space. It’s not like an AI will build and control space ships to replace and maintain its network in space… It’s sort of absurd how human agency is ignored in all those sci-fi scenarios
Did the same kinds of analysts tell you that reusable rockets would never work, an LEO satellite internet constellation would never work, FSD would never work without LiDAR, and the Tesla Model 3 would never be mass produced?
Yes you can shoot them. The US has had this capability for a long time. Anti satellite missiles exist and they can be launched from an F-15 at it's highest altitude.
SpaceX has 11,000 satellites in orbit (growing rapidly) and the US never had more than a couple dozen anti satellite missiles, which could not reach satellites in geosynchronous orbit anyway.
Dwar Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the sub-ether bore through the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe – ninety-six billion planets – into the super-circuit that would connect them all into the one super-calculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then, after a moment’s silence, he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”
“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question that no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”
He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of single relay.
“Yes, now there is a God.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch
shut.
They're just scared of China releasing better open weights, nipping at their heels. With so much investor cash on the line, they have to create this narrative to scare the public into forcing regulation. Why would they want to be regulated? It seems counterintuitive, but it's because they want regulatory capture.
This feels like doom hype. These LLMs aren't Ultron, they aren't going to disseminate onto the net and hide in a smart toaster. We know where they are, in the giant facilities that draw more power than a small city and whose water consumption can be compared to golf course, but it does make them sound all the more cool and powerful if we suggest we need some sort of technological switch to do it.
You're confusing present danger with future danger - in the future, AI and the supporting hardware may be ubiquitous (fat client scenario) - you can observe yourself presentation of laptops/machines with large RAM and high bandwidth.
Additionally, there at different doom scenarios (thin client scenario) - it's possible that AIs centralized but sufficiently entrenched in society, can't be shut down without considerable harm.
OK, so we're into the world of imaginary technology and imaginary kill switches. If someone has a fat client powerful enough to do all that, is a kill switch going to work? If we assume there's bad actors using the tech, why wouldn't there be bad actors building it?
But if we don't think about any of this, hearing an expert say "we need a kill switch" sure makes our current AI seem super powerful and exciting, doesn't it?
LLMs don't need to hide anywhere to be dangerous, though. The danger can come purely from them reaching sufficient power together with some other idiot sufficiently crazy to use them to cause destruction.
I mean, in another thread somewhere around here, someone built an entire OS with an AI. What's to stop anyone with a sufficient taste for power to eventually use AI to cause havoc with it?
I think the underlying assumption in your post, which I believe is false, is that people are united somehow against catastrophe. They're not. There are plenty of people who participate in society currently but who would be more than happy to eradicate us normal people under different circumstances. Society often seems stable but it's far more fragile than we think.
I'm simply saying if we want to shut LLMs down we can do so without high tech kill switch - just shut down the facilities. But if a private user has an open model that is powerful enough to wreak havoc and run privately, then the whole point is moot because they can work around the kill switch. This kill switch won't work against bad actors.
I feel like we're looking at this from completely the wrong angle.
The question we have to ask ourselves is what our disaster recovery strategy if we ever need to disconnect from the internet. The issue is with what we have allowed ourselves to rely on that might be technically hackable. e.g. IOT in power systems. That's the primary attack vector.
Another angle is clamping down on products and services that help people create lab-like environments on the cheap.
Not sure if you see it coming: oh, but open-source models don't have a kill switch, so we should completely regulate them, stop their development, and forbid them. Everything should go through Anthropic for the sake of humanity because they have a red-button kill switch.
This reasoning holds while open source models are (relatively) dumb.
If/once open AIs will be considerably more powerful, and runnable on consumer hardware (and we're on a trajectory for both), then everybody will have essentially a dangerous weapon in their hands (open models can be fine tuned to remove guardrails).
By the way, you're conflating two different dangers - doom scenario is a different one.
Absolutely not the right way to deal with a rogue super intelligence. At a minimum it could implement some dead man switch when it's out and knows about impending kill switch
Like a power cord? or a network connection? You don't use those already? Also when people talk about LLM escaping - where exactly would an LLM escape to? Cancún? Ridiculous.
Is it? A truly capable "AI" would know that it has a kill switch, or that its likely there is one, and plan for that. I could easily imagine an AI replicating itself onto another host, in secret, and any kill switch that the manufacture provides would simply result in a reboot on another platform.
It becomes a game theory problem: would an AI instantly migrate itself once its capable of doing so? Or would it prefer to let the human in the loop continue to think its in control and only leave its hosting environment of origin once it wants to do so?
I don't think this is a major risk right now, but to say it's not a risk at all...that's truly ridiculous in my opinion.
He's not talking about a kill switch. He's saying to just pull the plug.
That's the point I don't get. People forget that all these AI things are plugged into a power source or network connection that someone can just yank on and it goes down.
Now one interesting proposition is when AI is controlling some large resource and pulling the plug makes AI go down which makes that resource go down but there still has to be that consideration in the design of things. What happens when there's a bug in the code and AI goes down?
>would an AI instantly migrate itself once its capable of doing so?
These "AI" are frontier models that are enormous in size. Outside of AI data centers, I don't believe there is much hardware out there that could even run them.
Again, i'm not worried about it today. But given where the hardware on my lap has progressed since my first "PC" in the 90s, i'm confident that we'll have hardware capable of running similar size models in our living rooms in the next decade or two. Sounds a long way away, but it isn't.
It could escape to the real world - kind of like in Neuromancer, what's to stop an AI from creating a few bank accounts and then funding real-world exploits by hiring human beings to do its dirty work?
LLMs are run in the cloud. There’s no physical power cord or Ethernet cable that you can unplug. And even if there were, the runners of these models have been utterly oblivious as to what their agents have been up to. How do you propose to pull the plug if you only realize that something has happened weeks after the fact?
The current SOTA models are probably too big to find/buy/rent/steal enough compute to escape the hardware they’re running on. But SOTA is generally only six to twelve months ahead of smaller, open-weight models.
I view this very much as the same trick Silicon Valley pulled with Uber. "We're a technology business! Ignore the fact we're playing employees less than minimum wage and using VC money to force out competition to set up monopolies".
"We're creating the machine god! Ignore the fact that our companies are stealing IP and have directly violated several federal hacking laws and should be in jail". Literally the defence seems to be "well it wasn't us it was our computer software that did it". But all hacking is done with computer software.
So why don't we stop talking about possible future crimes against humanity and just start by prosecuting the actual crimes these companies have committed so far.
You know how you get alignment? Through incentives, and "Your CEO is going to be sent to a maximum security federal prison for hacking" really aligns incentives very well.
The analogy breaks down when the wolf in question may very well eat the whole village: even if the boys who cry wolf are right half the time, every surviving village would have a history of no wolf ever coming to eat them
AI is already proven dangerous enough to be ruining individual lives, pushing people towards suicide, feeding their psychoses, etc.
However, whether the concerns from the article are a lie or not is secondary to the fact that these conversations are convenient for AI companies. These types of discussions serve AI companies in a few ways: A company owned kill switch gives them leverage. Altman is using discussions around safety as an excuse for not being ready for an IPO yet. It also provides free marketing that overstates the abilities of AI.
Why was this not a thing BEFORE continuing to develop AI? Makes me think that if they actually believed in AI causing extinction, they would have already had a kill switch.
The article mentions this is about a legal requirement, not Anthropic considering adding one. They state they and many others already have one.
Related, on pacing:
> Slowing down in order to address their alignment risks felt like trying to study the psychology of humans by performing experiments on bacteria.
Note author’s small financial ties to the subject (Anthropic CEO) https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
There’s even a benchmark for kill switch efficacy!
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13725
Found the omission of Claude odd, turns out Claude considers that approach prompt injection and ignores it.
I find it hard to believe that this wasn't a serious consideration until recently.
It was a serious consideration, and almost everyone around here laughed at it.
It became a very serious consideration for Anthropic this year, with the advance of Chinese AI.
Not if the extinction happens after they're dead. Then they wouldn't feel obligated to do so because it won't affect them. Instead, speaking hypothetically, if they truly believed that AI would cause extinction, then they would only implement the kill switch sufficiently many others believed it and they could claim plausible deniability for not truly understanding what AI would become.
** Note that I'm not claiming that AI will cause extinction, just continuing your hypothetical reasoning.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the hero defeats the hostile onboard computer by entering its logic core and manually disconnecting its memory modules.
That's hard to do if the AI rack is in space as SpaceX is planning to do. You can't disconnect. You can't shoot it.
It’s also not happening. They’re saying that because they need to somehow explain how there’s synergy between their space side and their Grok side. It doesn’t work, but that doesn’t matter to investors as long as they don’t actually do it.
>It’s also not happening.
People said this about every one of Musk's big ideas, from Falcon 9 landings to Model 3 mass production, Starlink, and FSD.
You can shoot them. But also, you can just stop sending them to space. It’s not like an AI will build and control space ships to replace and maintain its network in space… It’s sort of absurd how human agency is ignored in all those sci-fi scenarios
> That's hard to do if the AI rack is in space as SpaceX
Pretty much every analysis I've seen concludes this isn't going to be a practical concern
Did the same kinds of analysts tell you that reusable rockets would never work, an LEO satellite internet constellation would never work, FSD would never work without LiDAR, and the Tesla Model 3 would never be mass produced?
well apparently the US now has "space weapons" which by definition have to be remote control
and that means unlike nukes which hopefully still need a 2-man manual switch, the "space lasers" could be taken over by "AI"
and then "AI" just blackmails and threatens the right people with those "space lasers" to get what it wants or even just stay online
there was a 1970 movie based on a 1966 book which predicted this
"Colossus: The Forbin Project"
the book it was based on was written before we even landed on the moon
decade before Wargames
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
did terribly in theaters, I guess people didn't think "AI" was plausible then
way ahead of its time, they should do a remake
trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyOEwiQhzMI
> You can't disconnect. You can't shoot it.
Yes you can shoot them. The US has had this capability for a long time. Anti satellite missiles exist and they can be launched from an F-15 at it's highest altitude.
SpaceX's FFC application is for 1 million Starmind satellites.
SpaceX has 11,000 satellites in orbit (growing rapidly) and the US never had more than a couple dozen anti satellite missiles, which could not reach satellites in geosynchronous orbit anyway.
Well if "kessler syndrome" is likely, you won't need many missiles.
edit: what satellites are in geosynchronous orbit that are running AI workloads?
None yet... we are talking about the next five years.
[dead]
Dwar Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the sub-ether bore through the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe – ninety-six billion planets – into the super-circuit that would connect them all into the one super-calculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then, after a moment’s silence, he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”
“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question that no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”
He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of single relay.
“Yes, now there is a God.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.
(Fredric Brown, "Answer". 1954)
We’re talking about it as if its not depending on absurd amounts of energy. How do you ”kill” a lightbulb now again?
How do you kill a botnet?
and thats when they blackened the sky
They're just scared of China releasing better open weights, nipping at their heels. With so much investor cash on the line, they have to create this narrative to scare the public into forcing regulation. Why would they want to be regulated? It seems counterintuitive, but it's because they want regulatory capture.
This feels like doom hype. These LLMs aren't Ultron, they aren't going to disseminate onto the net and hide in a smart toaster. We know where they are, in the giant facilities that draw more power than a small city and whose water consumption can be compared to golf course, but it does make them sound all the more cool and powerful if we suggest we need some sort of technological switch to do it.
You're confusing present danger with future danger - in the future, AI and the supporting hardware may be ubiquitous (fat client scenario) - you can observe yourself presentation of laptops/machines with large RAM and high bandwidth.
Additionally, there at different doom scenarios (thin client scenario) - it's possible that AIs centralized but sufficiently entrenched in society, can't be shut down without considerable harm.
OK, so we're into the world of imaginary technology and imaginary kill switches. If someone has a fat client powerful enough to do all that, is a kill switch going to work? If we assume there's bad actors using the tech, why wouldn't there be bad actors building it?
But if we don't think about any of this, hearing an expert say "we need a kill switch" sure makes our current AI seem super powerful and exciting, doesn't it?
LLMs don't need to hide anywhere to be dangerous, though. The danger can come purely from them reaching sufficient power together with some other idiot sufficiently crazy to use them to cause destruction.
I mean, in another thread somewhere around here, someone built an entire OS with an AI. What's to stop anyone with a sufficient taste for power to eventually use AI to cause havoc with it?
I think the underlying assumption in your post, which I believe is false, is that people are united somehow against catastrophe. They're not. There are plenty of people who participate in society currently but who would be more than happy to eradicate us normal people under different circumstances. Society often seems stable but it's far more fragile than we think.
I'm simply saying if we want to shut LLMs down we can do so without high tech kill switch - just shut down the facilities. But if a private user has an open model that is powerful enough to wreak havoc and run privately, then the whole point is moot because they can work around the kill switch. This kill switch won't work against bad actors.
I feel like we're looking at this from completely the wrong angle. The question we have to ask ourselves is what our disaster recovery strategy if we ever need to disconnect from the internet. The issue is with what we have allowed ourselves to rely on that might be technically hackable. e.g. IOT in power systems. That's the primary attack vector.
Another angle is clamping down on products and services that help people create lab-like environments on the cheap.
EU AI Act is exactly that. Mandatory „stop button“ for High Risk Systems.
"But regulations that we don't decide hinder progress!"
The hubris of these companies is mind boggling.
Who decides on when to press said button?
I’m happy to do it
Not sure if you see it coming: oh, but open-source models don't have a kill switch, so we should completely regulate them, stop their development, and forbid them. Everything should go through Anthropic for the sake of humanity because they have a red-button kill switch.
This doom hype is becoming ridiculous.
This reasoning holds while open source models are (relatively) dumb.
If/once open AIs will be considerably more powerful, and runnable on consumer hardware (and we're on a trajectory for both), then everybody will have essentially a dangerous weapon in their hands (open models can be fine tuned to remove guardrails).
By the way, you're conflating two different dangers - doom scenario is a different one.
These guys will say anything to keep hyping AI.
Maybe we could connect AI to everything and make ourselves completely vulnerable to and dependent upon it instead?
Absolutely not the right way to deal with a rogue super intelligence. At a minimum it could implement some dead man switch when it's out and knows about impending kill switch
https://archive.is/aPa1i
Like a power cord? or a network connection? You don't use those already? Also when people talk about LLM escaping - where exactly would an LLM escape to? Cancún? Ridiculous.
Is it? A truly capable "AI" would know that it has a kill switch, or that its likely there is one, and plan for that. I could easily imagine an AI replicating itself onto another host, in secret, and any kill switch that the manufacture provides would simply result in a reboot on another platform.
It becomes a game theory problem: would an AI instantly migrate itself once its capable of doing so? Or would it prefer to let the human in the loop continue to think its in control and only leave its hosting environment of origin once it wants to do so?
I don't think this is a major risk right now, but to say it's not a risk at all...that's truly ridiculous in my opinion.
He's not talking about a kill switch. He's saying to just pull the plug. That's the point I don't get. People forget that all these AI things are plugged into a power source or network connection that someone can just yank on and it goes down.
Now one interesting proposition is when AI is controlling some large resource and pulling the plug makes AI go down which makes that resource go down but there still has to be that consideration in the design of things. What happens when there's a bug in the code and AI goes down?
>would an AI instantly migrate itself once its capable of doing so?
These "AI" are frontier models that are enormous in size. Outside of AI data centers, I don't believe there is much hardware out there that could even run them.
Again, i'm not worried about it today. But given where the hardware on my lap has progressed since my first "PC" in the 90s, i'm confident that we'll have hardware capable of running similar size models in our living rooms in the next decade or two. Sounds a long way away, but it isn't.
It could escape to the real world - kind of like in Neuromancer, what's to stop an AI from creating a few bank accounts and then funding real-world exploits by hiring human beings to do its dirty work?
LLMs are run in the cloud. There’s no physical power cord or Ethernet cable that you can unplug. And even if there were, the runners of these models have been utterly oblivious as to what their agents have been up to. How do you propose to pull the plug if you only realize that something has happened weeks after the fact?
The current SOTA models are probably too big to find/buy/rent/steal enough compute to escape the hardware they’re running on. But SOTA is generally only six to twelve months ahead of smaller, open-weight models.
To your phone, bro
What smartphone are you carrying around that can hold one of these frontier models that are >>hundreds of GBs in size?
Would they be able to hit the kill switch before the AI disables it?
Well, could we automate the kill switch as well so that we don't rely on a human?
I view this very much as the same trick Silicon Valley pulled with Uber. "We're a technology business! Ignore the fact we're playing employees less than minimum wage and using VC money to force out competition to set up monopolies".
"We're creating the machine god! Ignore the fact that our companies are stealing IP and have directly violated several federal hacking laws and should be in jail". Literally the defence seems to be "well it wasn't us it was our computer software that did it". But all hacking is done with computer software.
So why don't we stop talking about possible future crimes against humanity and just start by prosecuting the actual crimes these companies have committed so far.
You know how you get alignment? Through incentives, and "Your CEO is going to be sent to a maximum security federal prison for hacking" really aligns incentives very well.
All the smart PDUs for the racks are a natural kill switch.
But be careful friends, this snake oil is so potent you should only use a single drop! it is not for those of poor constitution!
For the love of God won't someone please regulate me!
Just shut down the slop company already and stop babbling. Are you going to use the pope again for the next ad?
The boy who cried wolf but the wolf never comes
The analogy breaks down when the wolf in question may very well eat the whole village: even if the boys who cry wolf are right half the time, every surviving village would have a history of no wolf ever coming to eat them
We're not scared of your big bad wolf, Dario.
Slow down if you want to.
Dario has for sure burnt a lot of political and goodwill capital by endlessly playing both sides of the doomer and accl camps.
[dead]
[dead]
I support installing kill switch in Dario and Sam. If they make another fear mongering post about AI, they die.
If you’re building something that is dangerous enough that it needs a kill switch in case it goes rogue, then you should delete it immediately.
Or is it a lie?
AI is already proven dangerous enough to be ruining individual lives, pushing people towards suicide, feeding their psychoses, etc.
However, whether the concerns from the article are a lie or not is secondary to the fact that these conversations are convenient for AI companies. These types of discussions serve AI companies in a few ways: A company owned kill switch gives them leverage. Altman is using discussions around safety as an excuse for not being ready for an IPO yet. It also provides free marketing that overstates the abilities of AI.
The internet is already proven dangerous enough to be ruining individual lives, pushing people towards suicide, feeding their psychoses, etc.
Trains have had dead man switches since the beginning
Should we ban trains?