Some Anthropic veterans are reportedly buying remote land in case "AI goes awry"
Some early Anthropic employees are reportedly buying remote US land if AI development goes awry.
The Wall Street Journal reports that some of Anthropic's earliest employees are considering buying land in remote parts of the United States so they could relocate if AI development went badly. Former staff say similar contingency talk, including a desert government facility, dates to the company's early dinners. The piece links early Anthropic and OpenAI hires to Effective Altruism networks and cites Eliezer Yudkowsky's long-running warnings about uncontrolled AI.
- WSJ says some of Anthropic's earliest employees may buy remote US land.
- Staff have discussed Manhattan Project-style relocation if AI goes wrong.
- Report ties early Anthropic and OpenAI hires to Effective Altruism.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky is cited as a longtime influence on AI-risk fears.
Full article216 words · extracted from the-decoder.com · click to collapse
Some of Anthropic's longest-serving employees are making concrete contingency plans in case AI spirals out of control. Over the past few weeks, "some of its earliest employees" told an industry colleague they're considering buying land in remote parts of the US where they could relocate "if AI goes awry," the WSJ reports.
The idea of fleeing AI isn't new in this crowd. Former employees recall that even at company dinners during Anthropic's early days, people discussed a Manhattan Project-style scenario. They might be asked to move to the desert and keep building AI inside an electromagnetically shielded government facility.
The report traces how closely Anthropic's and OpenAI's earliest hires are tied to the Effective Altruism (EA) subculture. Some come from a Bay Area network of "doomers" who've spent years gaming out end-of-the-world scenarios. Eliezer Yudkowsky sounded the alarm about uncontrolled AI back in the mid-2000s, becoming the intellectual godfather of this subculture. Before AI rose to the top of the threat list, the group obsessed over catastrophic risks from asteroid impacts to supervolcanoes.
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Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://the-decoder.com/some-anthropic-veterans-are-reportedly-buying-remote-land-in-case-ai-goes-awry/