Stop the AI Race's Matthew Tromp calls AI development a crime

Good evening, counselors.

My name is Matthew Tromp.

I'm a computer scientist and leader of the New York City chapter of Stop the AI Race.

Our goal is to prevent the development of superhuman AI systems.

Until recently, I was friends with a number of employees at Anthropic.

I knew the technology they were building was dangerous, that could kill everyone on Earth.

But I trusted my friends.

I believed they had things handled.

Then I asked them how they planned to keep the superhuman AI systems they are planning to build under control to make them do what we want, to ensure they are safe.

They had no answer.

Everyone I spoke to believed, as I do, that superhuman AI would radically transform our lives, but all of them assumed that this transformation would be positive, with no thought given to why that would happen.

Today we heard from the representatives of the leading AI companies, despite being confronted about it multiple times by the council, for which I am grateful.

At no point did any of them explain concretely how they will make these increasingly powerful AI systems safe.

That is because they do not know how to do so.

Nobody knows how to do it.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic

admit this.

They do not know how to make superhuman AI systems safe, and yet they are building them anyway.

Their official plan is to ask AI to solve the problem for them.

This is madness.

We are in an emergency.

Your life is in danger.

Your children are in danger.

If we do not halt the development of these systems soon, possibly on the order of months, you will die.

Your loved ones will die.

The companies building these systems themselves admit that their project carries a significant risk of killing everyone on Earth, and yet they are building it anyway.

If nothing else, everyone working on this technology has admitted to 10 million counts of reckless endangerment in the first degree, a crime under New York state law for risking the lives of every citizen of this city.

It is not a defense to this charge to claim that someone else would endanger those lives if you did not.

It is not a defense to claim that the benefits will outweigh the risk.

It is a crime to endanger the lives of others like this without their consent.

I beg the council to enforce the law.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

You may continue.

Can you pass him the microphone, please?

Absolutely.

Thank you.