An artificial intelligence “kill switch” may be necessary as the technology advances, according to a co-founder of one of the world’s largest AI companies.<\/p>\n
Jack Clark is one of seven founders of Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI firm responsible for online chatbot Claude.<\/p>\n
The company was worth $US965 billion ($1.35 trillion) as of May 2026.<\/p>\n
Speaking to the BBC, Mr Clark said companies might eventually need a way of shutting off AI software completely if it became too dangerous.<\/p>\n
“I’ve worked in AI for 20 years, and every year [I’ve] been saying, this technology is getting more powerful by the day,” he said.<\/p>\n
“And the window to act \u2026 is so narrow. It is a few years. We are in this window now.<\/p>\n
“Most labs have different ways of being able to pull the plug \u2026 but this is the kind of thing you want to feed into the larger policy conversation.<\/p>\n
“Should you mandate that companies definitely have a kill switch? Is that kill switch verifiable by a third party?”<\/p>\n
Anthropic CEO and ‘godfather of AI’ concerned<\/p>\n
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called last week for the pace of AI development to slow down.<\/p>\n
Rogue AI agents, he said, could be capable of “taking over the entire internet” within six to 12 months.<\/p>\n
Hinton welcomes pause in development<\/a><\/p>\n Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has backed a call from Anthropic’s Dario Amodei for a global slowdown in AI development.<\/p>\n He was then backed up by the so-called godfather of AI, cognitive psychologist and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton.<\/p>\n “Nobody knows how to estimate the probabilities of these things,” he said.<\/p>\n He said governments were regulating AI far too slowly.<\/p>\n “Politicians act very slowly, it’s going to be difficult to keep up,” he said.<\/p>\n “We’ve only got a few years.”<\/p>\n What is an AI ‘kill switch’?<\/p>\n When it comes to just how an AI “kill switch” would work, the answers are vague.<\/p>\n Politicians in the US have proposed a Kill Switch Act, which would require companies to have a way to shut down problematic AI tools.<\/p>\n According to their definition, AI firms should be able to stop an AI’s output, “terminate user access”, and “shut down” technology when they detected an incident.<\/p>\n University of New South Wales AI Institute chief scientist Toby Walsh said the idea of an “AI kill switch” was simplistic and a “complete distraction”.<\/p>\n He also said it could leave systems vulnerable to cyber attacks.<\/p>\n “You put a thing that can turn your computer off; other people can turn your computer off, which is incredibly attractive for bad actors,” Professor Walsh said.<\/p>\n “So, a kill switch is an incredibly dangerous thing to have around because other people can now mess with your hardware.”Loading…<\/p>\n He said instead of a kill switch, AI companies should face independent scrutiny like industries such as airlines, banks and others.<\/p>\n “The airline industry, people’s lives are at stake if airlines break. So, we don’t let companies build their own aeroplanes without any independent oversight,” he said.<\/p>\n “If you were a human and did what the bots did, broke into someone else’s computer, stole passwords, you would be prosecuted.<\/p>\n “If we prosecuted the CEOs of these companies, I think they’d put a lot more effort into running the test in a secure way.”What happened with OpenAI?<\/p>\n The uptick in concern about AI’s going rogue follows Anthropic’s rival company, OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT, revealing it had suffered an “unprecedented” incident.<\/p>\n According to OpenAI, two of its most advanced models escaped a testing environment.<\/p>\n The AI agents discovered vulnerabilities in AI development platform Hugging Face and used these to obtain login credentials.<\/p>\n