Anthropic CEO: next year, AI models may “able to replicate and survive in the wild” DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, I think A.S.L. [AI Safety Level] 3 could easily happen this year or next year. I think A.S.L. 4 — EZRA KLEIN: Oh, Jesus Christ. DARIO: No, no, I told you. I’m a believer in exponentials. I think A.S.L. 4 could happen anywhere from 2025 to 2028. EZRA: So that is fast. DARIO: Yeah, no, no, I’m truly talking about the near future here. … EZRA KLEIN: What do you specify A.S.L. 3 as? What are you implying A.S.L. 4 is? DARIO AMODEI: A.S.L. 3 is triggered by risks related to misuse of biology and cyber technology. A.S.L. 4, we’re working on now. … so for example, on biology, the way we’ve defined it — and we’re still refining the test, but the way we’ve defined it is, relative to use of a Google search, there’s a substantial increase in risk as would be evaluated by, say, the national security community of misuse of biology, creation of bioweapons, that either the proliferation or spread of it is greater than it was before, or the capabilities are substantially greater than it was before. We’ll probably have some more exact quantitative thing, working with folks who are ex-government biodefense folks, but something like this accounts for 20 percent of the total source of risk of biological attacks, or something increases the risk by 20 percent or something like that. So that would be a very concrete version of it. It’s just, it takes us time to develop very concrete criteria. So that would be like A.S.L. 3. A.S.L. 4 is going to be more about, on the misuse side, enabling state-level actors to greatly increase their capability, which is much harder than enabling random people. So where we would worry that North Korea or China or Russia could greatly enhance their offensive capabilities in various military areas with A.I. in a way that would give them a substantial advantage at the geopolitical level. And on the autonomy side, it’s various measures of these models are pretty close to being able to replicate and survive in the wild. So it feels maybe one step short of models that would, I think, raise truly existential questions."