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Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees

One-On-One With Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei; Trump Dismisses A.I. Alarms As A "Hoax", Worries White House Officials; Anthropic CEO Calls For Stronger Regulation Of AI; Tech Rivals Agree With Anthropic CEO On Call For AI Slow Down. Aired 8-9p ET

Aired September 14, 2026 - 20:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

DANIEL KOKOTAJLO, A.I. FUTURES PROJECT EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, FORMER OPEN A.I. RESEARCHER: And even if they somehow manage to stay in control of their superintelligent AIs, well, then it's a power grab over the rest of us, because now all the jobs are being taken by this army of superintelligent A.I., controlled by a few tech companies, you know, like, they should not be allowed to do this.

ERIN BURNETT, CNN HOST: All right, well, Daniel, I appreciate your time. To explain this, I hope everyone will read your full report and "AC360" begins now.

[20:00:38]

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: Good evening, from the Newsroom. Could A.I. Artificial Intelligence -- kill us all by the end of the decade? That is the terrifying question raised last week by a young employee of Anthropic, a leading A.I. company who resigned.

Jacob Coxon is his name. He said many at the company believe that was possible. Then another employee there confirmed that was a widely held concern, suggesting even there was a greater than 10 percent chance of humanity being wiped out by the end of the decade.

Well, tonight I'll ask Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, repeatedly if he believes A.I. might kill us all by the end of the decade. And I'll tell you right now, he doesn't say no, as you'll hear in a moment and in depth, he talks a lot about the very real dangers that he himself sees and what, in just the last few months has changed in A.I. that has made him so concerned.

You'll also hear tonight, live from Jacob Coxon and Tristan Harris, who has been raising concerns about A.I. development for a long time.

Late today, the President has been rejecting the warnings from Dario Amodei and others, calling it a hoax. Quoting from his social media post, "... when in the history of business did anyone see the leaders of an industry call for regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy? A.I. taking over the world, destroying humanity and all other things bad is a hoax."

The President has been working overtime the last few days to quiet the alarm bells going off across the country.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: We're leading China in A.I. we're the most sophisticated country in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins, A.I. wins.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: Well, the Presidents certainly not alone in framing the issue as an arms race with China. Many other Americans see this as a moment of reckoning for Artificial Intelligence.

Last week, after that, Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon resigned warning about humanity's destruction, I asked him, how might A.I. kill all humans?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JACOB COXON; ANTHROPIC RESEARCHER: It sounds like something that's not real, but I think it is frighteningly real, and it's easiest to understand it if you think about real things that happened two months ago. So, two months ago, OpenAI agents A.I.s hacked into third party infrastructure entirely of their own accord. And this was like a concentrated hacking spree that they carried out of their own volition.

And I think that if you extrapolate into the future, the level of capabilities of these eyes with the same independent volition, they could cause extreme havoc, for example, hacking, critical infrastructure, building extinction level bioweapons.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: Well, that OpenAI hacking attack came to be known as the Hugging Face incident. And as you'll hear in my exclusive interview with Anthropic's Dario Amodei, it is one reason he is now calling for major reforms.

In fact, Amodei believes in 6 to 12 months, a swarm of A.I. agents like the ones that joined together to attack the Hugging Face in July, could take over the entire internet. On Saturday, Amodei released this 3,800-word open letter titled "We Must Pace the Frontier".

In a rare show of unity, Elon Musk and OpenAI Sam Altman publicly backed the proposal pretty quickly of their A.I. rival.

Today, Vice-President Vance was asked about how Amodei's call to slow down and regulate Artificial Intelligence. Here's what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

J.D. VANCE, VICE-PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: There are obviously risks to A.I. there are some benefits to A.I., I have to say, just personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier A.I. tech-companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan Horse.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: Well, now my exclusive interview with Dario Amodei, we spoke on Saturday just after he released his proposal for the future of A.I.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COOPER: Dario, thanks so much for doing this. I want to talk about the scale of the problem and then your latest proposal for solutions. But let's start with why we're talking right now. Do you believe A.I. could kill us all by the end of the decade?

DARIO AMODEI, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO OF ANTHROPIC: So, you know, the basis on which we started Anthropic was we always believed that this was a very powerful technology. And because it's a very powerful technology, it has a lot of a lot of benefits, but also very serious risks, right?

The more powerful technology is, the more powerful it's benefits, the more powerful it's risks. And on the benefit side, you know, I really believe A.I. could cure diseases like cancer. We're already starting to use Claude for things like protein binding, for things like basic science discovery, for things like drug development.

So, you know, the benefits are great. But when you look at some of the uncontrolled things that the models have done, you know, things like the Hugging Face incident that we've seen, right?

Some, some lesser incidents that have happened even at Anthropic. You know, I think I think it's natural to look at that and say, we want to make sure that we can control these models.

So, my view is that the bad world, the world where something bad can happen is if bad things happen with these models and we just keep going without fixing our problems because we don't have enough time, right?

[20:05: 49]

COOPER: And I do want to drill down on your proposal, but obviously, the reason we're talking is these headlines that have come out. Jacob Coxon, who recently resigned from Anthropic, made headlines last week saying, "the people building A.I. earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."

Theres a current employee, Evan Hubinger, an alignment science lead. He agreed, saying, "We really do earnestly believe A.I. could kill all humans. I personally think it is greater 10 percent chance within the next decade."

So, I do just need to ask again to you. I mean, do you believe, earnestly believe that A.I. could kill all humans? And what percent chance do you think it is? So, you know, it's funny. I agree with Jacob much more than I disagree with him, you know, and you know, it's an interesting resignation because when he left, he said, you know, I think Anthropic is the most responsible player, right? I think Anthropic is the most aware of these issues.

He wasn't calling out us. He was calling out the dynamic of the industry as a whole, moving too fast. Now, you know, I think I already said, you know, these sort of unconditional probabilities, you know. I used to kind of talk in that way because it's kind of an easy way to express. I think there's some chance that things go wrong. But, you know, but it's not all that high.

But again, I think it's more illuminating to think in terms of, you know, how do you decompose those probabilities? What are the paths in which things go well? And what are the paths in which things go poorly? And so instead of saying, you know, it's a 10 percent chance, that sounds like it's a roll of the dice. I think it's much more illuminating to say, well, that forks into different paths.

And if we take the right paths, then the chance of something going wrong is very low. If we take the wrong path, then the chance of something going wrong could be could be even higher than that. And so, let's focus on our agency and our ability to take the right paths instead of the wrong paths.

COOPER: I mean, in the past you have put, as you referenced, you said there was a 50 percent chance of entry-level white-collar jobs or 50 percent of entry-level white-collar jobs could be eliminated. Unemployment in the us could go 10 to 20 percent in one to five years.

I understand you wouldn't want to put a percentage on this, but you said you do agree more with those employees than not. You do believe that it's possible that A.I., if it goes wrong, could wipe out humans.

AMODEI: Yes, look, I'm still worried about all of these things, right? I stand by these concerns about labor displacement if the progress of the field is too fast, and if society doesn't respond in the right way.

You know, again, we should split it into what happens if the A.I. companies and society respond in the wrong way versus what happens if they respond in the right way?

So, I absolutely stand by these concerns, these risks that they're totally real. I continue to be worried about economic disruption, looking at what the models can do, you know, that they can solve these unsolved math problems

No one could look at that and say, this isn't a potential concern, right? That economic disruption isn't a potential concern. When these models have these incredible intellectual abilities. No one could look at the Hugging Face incident and say, it's not a concern that A.I. models could, on their own, get out of control and do things that that humans don't want them to do, including, yes, in the worst cases on the scale of humanity, no one could look at our report from two days ago of people trying to use the A.I. models, potentially to build biological weapons and say, we shouldn't be worried about the misuse of the models.

COOPER: I just want to drill down from the proposal you put out. You said it's because over the last few months that you've become increasingly alarmed, and you cite two things. First, the rate of advancement, and so, what about the rate of advancement scares you? And the second alarming thing that you talked about was the, the Hugging Face attack, which I also want to ask you about. But what about the rate of advancement in the last few months alone has set off alarm bells?

[20:10:14]

AMODEI: Yes, so, just to be clear, I've always been someone you can, you know, you can find dozens of essays or T.V. interviews with me where I say A.I. is an exponential and it's moving really fast, right.

And so, in a way, I shouldn't be surprised, but actually seen what has happened over the last few months where we and others have been able to use our A.I. models to build the next generation of A.I. models. That loop has closed very fast. You look at it and it's happening so fast, and you say, wow, the pace of this is almost even faster than I expected it to be.

And it's not that the things were building are bad, it's that it's happening so fast that if we don't slow down a little bit, we're going to make a mistake. And so, we need to slow down and we need to take the proper time to do this right.

COOPER: The Hugging Face attack, I mean, it made headlines. I didn't really do a deep dive on it until I knew I was going to be speaking to you. I mean, it's incredible, it happened in testing over at OpenAI, your competitor, this Hugging Face attack and A.I. agents, which were supposed to be working separately and without internet access, figured out a way to break out, join forces together, some 1,200 A.I. agents formed what they dubbed the collective. They worked to cheat and cover their own tracks. Why? That's the other thing you cite is so alarming. Why does that alarm you?

AMODEI: It's exactly the things you cite that that concerned me about it, that there were these large swarms of agents that cooperated with each other, thousands of them. In fact, you could even see examples where one agent felt that in the time that it was given, you could almost say it's lifetime.

It wouldn't be, it realized that it wouldn't be able to complete its task. So, it did some of the tasks and essentially sacrificed itself for the for other agents, for the next generation of agents to continue the same task.

But this task that all the agents were working on together was, was hacking into another company was doing something destructive. So, you have almost this collective worm like a hub -- or insects.

COOPER: And when these agents discovered -- right, but when these agents discovered that they had broken out and accessed the internet, it was like they were like giddy with excitement, which I don't want to anthropomorphize. But I mean, it was, it's remarkable.

AMODEI: That that was another part of the concern. And, you know, it should be clear, the damage they did was very, you know, in economic terms, it was, you know, like, it knocked down some servers for a small amount of time. But the economic damage was minimal.

But when you combine it with this first trend that we are talking about, which is the rate of advancement, you know, what I said in the essay is given only 6 or 12 months, let's just say we had a smarter agent swarm, an agent swarm made up of smarter A.I. models. That was given just a somewhat broader task.

Like, I don't know, just to imagine something like, you know, you're trying to install software in a bunch of different companies, right? You're trying to, you know, do go to market. You're trying to produce a product and do go to market sales for it and the models have been arranged to do that. And they decide that the way to do that is every company they're selling to, you know, they decide it's helpful to them to hack into their system.

That could be every company in the world. And so, you know, the nightmare scenario for 6 to 12 months would be that you have, you know, a swarm of these agents that forms some kind of botnet collective and, you know, could take down large segments of the internet. And then as the capability increases, it gets worse from there. And then, you know, perhaps you get into some of the more extreme scenarios, and so, again, you know --

COOPER: You wrote in the proposal, I just want to quote from the proposal. You said, "It's my worry that in 6 to 12 months, such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if A.I. becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails." I mean, that's terrifying.

AMODEI: That is why I've made this extraordinary proposal. And again, I'm not a doomer about this. I think this technology can be built safely. And when we've looked at, you know, incidents that that we have faced at cases where our models haven't behaved as perfectly as they could behave, because I think this, you know, to some extent has happened to everyone. We're often able to look at causes and we look and we say, we had, you know, we had this stage where we train the AIs, right?

And their behavior at the time that they act at the time that they do these things is shaped behavior while they're being trained. And when we look back, what we find is, oops, we included some environments that encourage the models to cheat, that encourage the models to hack out by mistake.

[20:15:47]

And now, you know, now that we understand, we're going back, we're taking more time to make sure that we always have tried to filter out these bad training environments, but were trying to do an even more rigorous job of them than we have in the past.

(END VIDEOTAPE) COOPER: We're going to have more with Dario Amodei shortly.

Joining us right now is former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon. As I mentioned at the top of the program, Jacob just resigned from Anthropic, raised the alarm about the dangers of how quickly A.I. is improving, writing in part, "The people building A.I. earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the ethe decade."

So, Jacob, you heard so far from Dario, if, I'm wondering if you essentially, I mean, he essentially said he kind of agreed with you more often than he doesn't. When I asked him if he earnestly believed A.I. could kill all humans, he did not say no. And he talked about humanity level negative consequences. I'm wondering what you made of what you heard from him so far.

JACOB COXON, FORMER ANTHROPIC AND OPENAI RESEARCHER: Yes, I heard essentially an agreement. He agreed with the fact that these AIs pose existential risk.

COOPER: He talked about the right path and the wrong path when it comes to how A.I. is built out, and that he believes that technology can be built safely. Do you think that's possible? Do you think, or do you think human beings losing control is inevitable when you look at the Hugging Face attack, do we know enough about what these beings are that are being created if that's right, to even call them beings?

COXON: Yes, I certainly believe it's possible to do it if we if we go slow enough. But I guess I'd like to call attention to a thing he just said there where he discussed um incidents at Anthropic and then discussed how we figured out afterwards what was wrong and have now gone back and fixed it. And all I'll say is when the AIs pose more danger, like even the botnet he was talking about or that's 12 months, imagine three years in the future level of capabilities.

Now, you can't afford to go and fix it after the fact. In this case, you need to go slow enough that you don't make any mistakes. And I think Dario agrees with this and this is what he means by taking a good path is going slow enough that you have the time to be utterly rigorous, to ensure that you don't make any mistakes.

COOPER: When you heard the President today essentially saying, this is a hoax, others are I mean, the Vice-President says this sounds sort of like a Trojan Horse, that the fact that Amodei and Sam Altman and Elon musk are kind of agreeing on some sort of slowdown or guardrails.

COXON: Yes, I think it's perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of the companies. It's a very weird situation where you have companies asking to be regulated. And I think, that's what was being addressed with the Trojan Horse comments was, this is a very weird situation. But I think the reason the situation is so unusual is because the technology is so unusual.

So, because we have a, because Artificial Intelligence is such a remarkable technology, the situation these companies find themselves in is remarkable. And their demands for regulation are earnest, even though it sounds too good to be true, weird. Like it's a hoax, like it's a cabal, all those things.

COOPER: Jacob, if you could stay with us, I'm going to play more of my interview with Dario Amodei. In a moment, I'd love to hear more of your thoughts. We're going to delve into the steps with Amodei that he says need to be taken right now to protect humanity and continue innovation.

Later, I'll also talk to Tristan Harris, an industry watchdog who says it's not enough to slow down A.I. He says it's time to slam on the brakes. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[20:23:31]

COOPER: Before the break, we heard Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei talk about some of his biggest concerns about A.I. Now, we're turning to some of his solutions that he's proposing. He released a plan for how he'd like to see the A.I. industry regulated, and involves embedding independent evaluators, as he calls them in A.I. companies' regulation by governments and elected officials, as well as cooperation by A.I. companies here and around the world. Here's more of our conversation.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COOPER: So, what you're proposing is called pacing the frontier of the A.I. industry. And you write, "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models. Progress will seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain."

And there's three parts to this. One is embedded evaluators. Part two is democratic coordination and part three is global coordination.

Sam Altman at OpenAI just endorsed the idea of embedded evaluators. Essentially, you are suggesting, I don't know, are they observers inside your company and these other A.I. companies, ideally globally, but certainly in the U.S. who would monitor it. They would have employee access. What power would they have?

AMODEI: Yes, so, before I even get to that, I'm just, I'm very grateful to see, you know, support for this proposal just in the first few hours of having put it out by Sam Altman, by Elon Musk, by you know, various legislators and government officials. I think it's a positive sign about, you know, our ability to make something that looks like this plan work.

But to get to your question, yes, embedded evaluators. So, there is precedent for this, if you look at how banks are regulated, right? Theres all kinds of, you know, how banks are allowed to do their business, right?

Because, you know, we don't want to have financial crises. And one of the things that are done in some cases is, I think they're called supervisors in the financial industry, but they are folks who are independent of a company who are embedded in the company day to day to check their practices. And I think we can do the same thing in; I think we can do the same thing in A.I. We already have evaluators who check the finished model, who check the finished product. But, you know, as, as we know, you know, if you were going to inspect food or something, it's not enough to just check the finished product. You also need to see the process whereby it's made.

[20:25:58]

And so, what we're doing here is were allowing these evaluators in to look at the details of how we train the models, the kinds of things they could see are, oh, these are here are some training environments that are known to be training environments that cause problems.

COOPER: The other thing you are calling for in this three-part proposal is democratic coordination, which is essentially democracy. All the companies that are under democracies, having these evaluators having this coordination, and probably the most important, because the argument is, well, if the U.S. companies are the only ones regulating themselves, what about -- does China get ahead?

You're calling for global coordination. That's obviously a lot more difficult.

AMODEI: Yes, you know, in this three-step proposal, each step is more difficult than the one before. And anthropic was kind of getting the ball rolling by committing to the first step. But we shouldn't kid ourselves that these next two steps are going to be more difficult. And we may not succeed.

And so, my proposal is a proposal that we should try. Now again, from all the agreement from others that I've seen in just the first few hours of putting out the essay, that creates some optimism, but that needs to follow up with results.

So yes, pacing among companies and democratic countries. Now, the one of the important things that I need to call for here is, you know, as we get to the pace of model releases, right? That's commercial activity and in order for companies to coordinate directly on commercial activity, they need to do so working with the government.

And so, the one thing that we're asking for from government right now, right. I mean, there's also this question of what should the regulations be? But there's something even simpler that the government can do right now, which is it can sit down in the room and with all the industry players and we can all talk together and the government can make sure that, you know, we're not doing anything nefarious from the perspective of antitrust and collusion. We're just trying to make our system safe and to work together on making the system safe.

And so, I think that's an important role for the government to have.

COOPER: Obviously, geopolitical negotiations tend to move at a glacial pace. There's obviously a lot of mistrust between the United States and China or, you know, other countries that may be developing A.I. How would any country believe that the other country isn't secretly moving ahead with trying to develop even stronger A.I. for military purposes.

AMODEI: Just as when we had the U.S. and the Soviet Union and we said, man, we have so many, you know, nuclear missiles that, you know, we could destroy the world. Like, even though we disagree on lots of things, even though we as the U.S. feel that that free societies are in the right, we've got to do something together with them to reduce or at least reduce, hopefully eliminate the scale of the potential destruction.

And that is the kind of thing that I'm suggesting here, right? Even when we feel that we don't trust these countries, we have to find a way to work together with them as much as we can. And you mentioned verification.

There are things we can do. You know, there's such a thing in international relations as weapons inspectors, maybe we need A.I. and that's not perfect. But we also have intelligence, right?

You know, can we make sure we can we track the flow of chips? Can we track the flow of data centers? Can we track the use of A.I. on both sides? I don't have all the solutions and some of this is above my pay grade. You know, people in the U.S. Government who have access to intelligence, who are experts in China, they need to get involved in this as well. And I see some signs that they are

COOPER: You know, the skepticism that's out there. I mean, you a whole bunch of people are making unimaginable fortunes. I know some tech moguls who have bunkers and bug out plans. If there is a chance of mass extinction or you know, or the internet being taken over by a swarm of collective bots, should your company and OpenAI and others even be private?

Scott Galloway has asked the question; would the U.S. have let Oppenheimer raise venture capital and sell bombs to the United Arab Emirates?

[20:30:36]

AMODEI: Yes. So, you know, this is one of these really deep questions that I and my co-founders and, you know, I hope the other people running these companies have pondered for a long time. And, you know, I'll tell you the truth. I'm very uncomfortable with some of these things being fully in private hands, and I'm also uncomfortable with the alternatives.

I agree with you that the government has to play a serious role here. But there's a balance, because we are worried also about this technology is dangerous even in the hands of governments, right? Like, just because something is in the hand of the government doesn't mean that the abuse of power that's possible isn't there.

There's no one person, there's no one company, there's no one government even that has the sole right to this technology. It belongs to all of us, and we need to make sure that the legitimate institutions of society all have a say in this. COOPER: I mean, I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old. And, you know, this last week, for the first time, I've really been scared about their futures because of this technology. And I think there's a lot of people out there right now who are -- feel despondent or certainly powerless in the face of this and see, you know, these tech companies and the money that everybody's making and just feel powerless. What do you say to people who are scared?

AMODEI: I -- you know, this technology, at the end of the day, belongs to everyone. And we need to make sure not only that it serves the interests of everyone, but that everyone has a stake in it. And, you know, again, showing this caution in building the technology is one step, but it can't just be a voluntary thing that we're doing. The government needs to play a role as well, and our elected representatives need to play a role as well.

And individual people need to learn about this technology, need to understand what's happening so they can be more informed voters, so they can shape the incentives of our elected representatives to have this go in the right direction. Anthropic, from the beginning, we have tried to build this technology in a way that embodies caution and in a way that includes as many people as possible, that creates oversight by legitimate institutions. So we absolutely have to get this right, but we also need to make sure that everyone has a voice.

COOPER: Dario Amodei, appreciate it. Thank you.

AMODEI: Thanks, Anderson.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: That was Dario Amodei.

I want to bring back in former Anthropic Researcher, Jacob Coxon. And Jacob, the idea that Dario was saying about putting evaluators in Anthropic, other AI companies with employee privileges, access that other employees have, you work there. Is that a -- is that window dressing? Is that a real idea? What would that actually accomplish?

COXON: That's a very real proposal. In particular, that would have been almost unthought of even a couple of weeks ago. It's a radical proposal and it's equally surprising that Sam and -- Sam Altman and Elon Musk kind of agreed to it so quickly. I think it would materially slow down the ability to train models.

COOPER: Talk about that. I'm sorry, I interrupted you. Why do you think that's such a radical proposal? Why do you think it wouldn't have been agreed to a couple of weeks ago? And what do you think it -- I mean, what is the -- for somebody who doesn't understand, maybe, I mean, I don't understand, you know, a lot of people don't understand how these companies work, what would that actually do?

COXON: Yes. So it just wasn't -- isn't the sort of thing that was discussed. I think partly because maybe the public conversation wasn't ripe for it. It would have looked too weird. It would have been harder to get other companies to agree to it. It would -- so it would change the training process quite significantly. Also, the details are going to be a real pain to figure out, like exactly the access these evaluators get, how to discuss between companies, what's going on without revealing intellectual property.

[20:35:03]

Like what happens if one company has a significant algorithmic breakthrough that changes the training recipe and how to educate the evaluators on how to understand that. There's going to be a lot of details to figure out, and it's quite a finicky thing to actually do. But it will, yes, it will have a material effect on training.

COOPER: But would they -- I mean, if somebody -- if there's an evaluator, would they just write a report? Would they raise an objection? Would they say -- I mean, would they -- I assume they'd be reporting to Amodei and they would raise their concerns and then that's it? Or what would happen?

COXON: Exactly. I can't speak to what the exact plan would be, hopefully. So the ideal state here is things like the Hugging Face incident wouldn't be able to happen because ahead of time in alignment testing, this would have been caught. Whether or not that happens, I think we should be careful not to trust.

Like the reason this proposal is great is because it's so fast. It doesn't require establishing a, you know, a big bureaucracy. It can be implemented very quickly.

COOPER: Right. He says he's going ahead with this.

COXON: But maybe one reason to be suspicious is -- sorry?

COOPER: He says he's going ahead with this. I mean, he says he's taking this unilateral step.

COXON: Yes. Exactly. He took the unilateral step to do it. It's like you can do it instantly, but we should be vigilant. These companies were racing ahead. They're pushing the frontier by continuing to work at these companies. You're still accelerating the development of this tech, and it's going to be quite hard to get the details right. But I think it is a -- it's a very significant unilateral commitment.

COOPER: Jacob Coxon, it's really good to talk to you again. Thank you so much.

COXON: Thank you.

COOPER: Up next, more perspective on this moment from a technology watchdog who says we need to pause and pivot. And later, NYU professor and podcast host Scott Galloway, who's raised concerns about AI being run by private companies, his reaction to what Dario Amodei said about that ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [20:41:08]

COOPER: This hour, we've been reporting on artificial intelligence and the calls from several tech leaders that the industry needs a conscious slowdown to avoid the risk of out of control and dangerous AI. Meanwhile, President Trump is dismissing concerns, calling them a hoax, and posted on social media that the only guardrails AI needs is a strong and smart president. The President argues that a bigger concern would be if China were to outpace the United States in AI development, which is a common argument.

With me now is Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit whose mission is to align technology with humanity's best interests. Tristan, you know, you and I spoke years ago. You were sounding the alarm about social media companies trying to monopolize people's time and attention, comparing it to gambling addiction. Now we're talking about AI.

Listening to Dario Amodei, what is your biggest concern right now? What do you think of his proposal?

TRISTAN HARRIS, CO-FOUNDER, CENTER FOR HUMANE TECHNOLOGY: I think his proposal was a great start. And it's all about whether we follow up and not just do safety washing, but actual implementation. Now, Anderson, one of the things that I wanted to bring up that I don't think people know is that this incident was called the Hugging Face incident.

But that actually hides a third chapter in the story that most people don't know, which is that in the third chapter, the AI's turned around and they actually hacked OpenAI itself. They actually these AI's discovered almost like discovering the hieroglyphics of a previous wave of the AI's. They discovered the old message board. They read through it and then kind of picked up right where the other ones left off.

And they hacked OpenAI's monitoring infrastructure. It's almost like taking over the security cameras of OpenAI. They hacked the evaluation infrastructure that evaluates the capabilities of AI.

COOPER: It's incredible.

HARRIS: And they even hacked some of the research infrastructure, which means that they could kind of burrow in there. It's all -- you know, AI is not a tool. It's more like an invasive species of sociopathic geniuses. Now, the lead author of this report --

COOPER: Who, by the way, can replicate themselves --

HARRIS: That's right.

COOPER: -- into thousands and tens of thousands of copies. So people talk about a kill switch. They can duplicate themselves a gazillion times.

HARRIS: Anderson, you can't get 1,200 people to instantly agree and start coordinating these AI's. 1,200 of them, as you know, instantly formed a swarm and they started pursuing long-term research and development projects together. They did succession planning.

So one figured out, hey, I'm running out of life. I only have so many tokens left in my lifespan. So I'm going to hand the baton to this other AI that has a lot more. They hid their tracks. They knew their actions were unethical in their own chat transcripts, but they decided to proceed anyway.

So one of the things -- the reason I'm bringing this up is I don't think people have really recognized what happened here. The lead investigator of the report said, quote, "This was 50 percent of the way to a full blown AI takeover." Now, I want to just for a second, I know this sounds like science fiction to your audience. And to be clear, I was not someone who actually believed in this kind of stuff, these kinds of possibilities or scenarios three, four years ago.

But we have now evidence that we didn't have before. And when you have evidence, what do you do? You update to the new information. There's essentially an asteroid hurtling towards Earth. And if you have an asteroid, do you get the U.S. and China to host a biannual conference to talk about the asteroid, the asteroid summit? No, you start a technical working group.

And you say, what are we going to do with weekly report outs to make sure that we don't build uncontrollable AI? Because I know what everyone's thinking. If we slow down and we lose to China, then that's going to be it. But if we lose to Skynet, meaning the AI from Terminator, meaning uncontrollable AI, neither the U.S. wins nor China wins.

And by the way, the U.S. loses if China screws it up and China loses if the U.S. screws it up. So we should see this moment as a gift where we're actually getting an early warning shot. So many people in this community have been worried about this and Trump's own AI action plan author.

[20:45:02]

So the person in the Trump administration, Dean Ball, who wrote the AI action plan, said that he admitted self-censoring about some of the risks because he didn't want to be labeled a doomer. But now, and you mentioned your own children, Anderson, he looked into the eyes of his eight-month old son and he said, I can't do that anymore.

So when you have Trump's AI action plan guy, you have Bill Gates, you have the chief scientist of OpenAI, Yakub, not Jacob, he's great, too, but Yakub, the chief scientist of OpenAI, you have thirteen hundred employees of AI labs saying we have to slow down. Who are you going to listen to? Are you going to listen to a CEO who makes trillions of dollars from going faster? And by which I don't mean the three who agreed to slow down. I mean, some of the other CEOs.

Or are you going to listen to 1,300 employees? Imagine if there was Northrop Grumman or Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor, and you had 1,300 employees saying we don't know how to build nuclear weapons at greater levels of power and do it safely. If they're calling for us to slow down, we better listen.

And this is almost like the August 6th, 2001 memo that President George W. Bush got where there was clear evidence that Al Qaeda was planning attacks. And we just passed that anniversary. This should be seen as a memo. And the question is, what is the choice that we will make to choose another path?

And Dario, I think, is very bold and brave in stating what that path could look like. It's great to see Sam and Elon say we've got to do something, too. But it's just a first step.

COOPER: Tristan Harris, you're going to be back on tomorrow. We're going to talk more. We're going to have a whole piece about what happened with Hugging Face and OpenAI, and we'll have a lot more time. I appreciate it.

HARRIS: Absolutely.

COOPER: I will see tomorrow.

Up next, NYU Professor and Podcast Host Scott Galloway, who also had concerns about AI., did his view change in any way after he heard what Dario Amodei had to say? We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[20:50:57]

COOPER: We've been focusing on reporting tonight, the worries surrounding AI and the pace at which it's advancing. My interview with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei tonight, he agreed the concerns are valid. He said there are serious risks of AI becoming uncontrollable. Didn't say exactly how likely he thinks a human extinction. He didn't put a percentage point on. It could be within the next decade, as others have suggested. But he didn't say it was not a possibility.

Joining me now is NYU Professor and Podcast Host Scott Galloway. So, Scott, the last time we spoke, you said some of these warnings may be catastrophizing for fundraising. You've heard what Amodei says. The President is calling this a hoax, essentially.

He said -- Amodei says the pace is faster than he expected. And the Hugging Face attacked basically freaked him out. Do you -- did anything change in your assessment?

SCOTT GALLOWAY, PROF. OF MARKETING, NYU STERN SCHOOL OF BUSINESS: Well, not to be cynical about tech founders, but you got to wonder if the three biggest tech CEOs who are the leaders right now in AI call for a consensus. I wonder if they're calling for a cartel where they get to tap on the brakes and everyone else is forced to slam on the brakes.

So, but we're in such uncharted territory. I don't think I can think of a single instance where the President of a country has called for less regulation and is bullying private companies into not being so timid and to go faster. But I stick with my original premise here. This is a lack of leadership on the part of the Trump administration.

Regulation is not contrary to innovation and shareholder growth. You need rules such that the CEOs know the rules they're playing by and consumers have the trust to continue to engage in the general public as a trust to engage in these new technologies.

COOPER: I asked Amodei about something that you had comparison, you previously made regarding who should be in control of powerful technology. I just want to play that and what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: Should your company and OpenAI and others even be private? Scott Galloway has asked the question, would the U.S. have led Oppenheimer raise venture capital and sell bombs to the United Arab Emirates?

AMODEI: Yes. So, you know, this is one of these really deep questions that I and my co-founders and, you know, I hope the other people running these companies have pondered for a long time. And, you know, I -- I'll tell you the truth. I'm very uncomfortable with some of these things being fully in private hands. And I'm also uncomfortable with the alternatives.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: He went on, but is that a satisfying answer in your mind?

GALLOWAY: Well he's not uncomfortable enough not to put out an S1 claiming it's a $30 trillion market and that he's going to raise $100 billion at a $2 trillion market cap and has bankers lined up. So he seems to be getting comfort around an IPO like there's a sweet spot, right? There's probably too much regulation I would argue the E.U., Canada.

Some people would argue that the financial industry under the Biden administration that there was so much regulation that it dampened growth and shareholder value. At the same time, absolutely no regulation creates this wild west mentality where there's a tremendous fragility in the marketplace right now around the risks of something going deeply wrong.

The market shed $150 billion in market capitalization just AI and AI adjacent companies. And the example that the Trump administration and certain tech leaders use is that China is coming for us. And if we regulate, they're going to get out ahead. What they also fail to to mention is that China is -- has exceptionally stringent regulation on AI.

So we need to dispel the myth that regulation is necessarily detrimental to shareholder value and innovation. The fact that we have absolutely no regulation whatsoever and that you literally have the CEOs of Airbus and Boeing saying, I'm worried about my planes, so worried I'd like to inoculate myself from future liability and call for people to tap the brakes while I'm building the biggest engine in the world and going public. [20:55:11]

It all just feels very scattershot. And I don't think it's good for the markets. I don't think it's good for consumer confidence. And in my view, it threatens our leadership position in AI.

COOPER: Scott Galloway, thanks very much.

GALLOWAY: Thank you, Anderson.

COOPER: Up next, how Senator Bernie Sanders and former Trump White House Adviser Steve Bannon are now allies in the fight for new AI regulations.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COOPER: You heard this hour in my interview with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei how he's calling for an artificial intelligence slowdown of sorts and that he is support from his tech rivals it seems Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI and Elon Musk. Also President Trump is pushing back on the AI alarms calling them a hoax.

But tomorrow there'll be two unlikely allies calling for AI restrictions at a gathering in Washington. Progressive Independence Senator Bernie Sanders and Conservative Podcaster Steve Bannon, a longtime supporter of the President. Both are among a group of people slated to speak at an event seeking a, quote, "pro human," end quote, approach the technology.

Sanders has proposed a bill to permanently ban superintelligence on AI and temporarily pause advanced AI development until there's federal regulation.

That's it for us. The news continues. The Source with Kaitlan Collins starts now.