Out of all the big AI players, Anthropic is the one that likes to doomsay about AI the most — because it’s also the most concerned about AI safety, of course.

So you’ll never guess what kind of wacky stuff that its newly hired economist, Chad Jones, believes.

As the Financial Times recently highlighted, Jones — a longtime Stanford economics professor — once wrote a paper that weighed up what would be an acceptable risk level of human extinction from AI, against the potential benefits it would bring for all-important economic growth.

And reader: we are concerned.

“Recall that we would face a flow probability of existential risk of 1 percent per year for 40 years, so the probability we survive this AI explosion is exp (−.01 × 40) ≈ 0.67,” Jones wrote.

“In other words, with log utility it is optimal to take a 1 in 3 chance of ending human existence in exchange for a 2/3 chance of dramatically raising living standards by a factor of 55.”

In other other words: playing with human-extinction-fire is okay — a 33 percent chance of killing us all, by Jones’ own calculations — because AI might magically make the economy boom and have everyone living in beautiful solar powered high-rises.

Not everyone thinks this is an “optimal” risk to take. 

“This isn’t poker where you let the math guide you because even if you lose now on a net positive decision it works out in the long run,” one reader on Reddit fumed. “Ending human existence requires a tad more discretion.”

As questionable as Jones’ take may seem, it’ll fit right in at Anthropic. Publicly stressing out about AI’s potential consequences is the company’s modus operandi, allowing it to maintain the moral high ground over its competitors.

While Anthropic may very well have a commitment to safety — which you may rightly question for reasons such as its Claude AI being used to select strike targets in Iran despite Anthropic’s public spat with the Pentagon over the safe deployment of its tech — this tactic has the nefarious effect of hyping up AI’s capabilities.

Fretting about how AI ends the world is built on the assumption that AI will or already is powerful or consequential enough to make that happen, which ultimately reinforces the idea that Anthropic is an important company with important ethical questions on its plate. And who do you think that benefits?

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