Anthropic's Heck Says AI Companies Can't Self-Regulate, Calls for Government Oversight

Sarah Heck, Anthropic's head of public policy, said she doesn't think artificial intelligence companies can manage oversight and safety concerns by following an "honor code."

"We want to work with government to figure out what makes sense," Heck said at the Politico Decoded summit in Washington, D.C. "We can't be checking our own homework, and that's very clear."

Heck's comments come days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei rocked the tech sector by calling on the industry to deliberately slow the pace of model development. Amodei proposed a three-step plan on Saturday to temper how quickly model capabilities improve without "sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead in AI."

Industry executives including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind Chair Demis Hassabis quickly voiced support for Amodei's proposal, which came after industry researchers last week raised the alarm on AI's potential to cause catastrophic harm.

"Dario is right," Musk wrote in a post on X on Saturday.

Other tech leaders, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are less convinced that development needs to be intentionally slowed.

During a keynote at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference on Tuesday, Huang said the industry doesn't need new laws or regulations. He added that speed and safety are not mutually exclusive, though companies should pace themselves until they are sure they are releasing products that are ready for launch.

Zuckerberg echoed Huang's comments on Tuesday, and he said Meta delayed the release of Muse, its personal AI agent, for "several months to focus on safety and security."

"We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would," Zuckerberg wrote in a post on X. "We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us."

Heck said Wednesday that Anthropic talks to the White House on a "daily basis," and that the company has been working with Congress "all year." She said Anthropic is making an effort to ask "the hard questions now."

"If we don't start thinking about some of these hard things now, whether it's how we deal with China, whether it's how we do AI regulation, whether it's how we continue to advance our own safeguards — if we're not doing it now, it's it may be too late," Heck said.