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Hendrycks: Loss-of-Control Risk Stems from Competitive Pressure to Fully Automate AI R&D

Dan Hendrycks · AI's Rising Risks: Hacking, Virology, Loss of Control — With Dan Hendrycks · Mar 28, 2025 · at 7:25

Dan Hendrycks discusses structural and competitive dynamics that could lead to loss of control over autonomous AI systems.

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“Loss of control risks, which I think primarily stem from people, an AI company trying to automate all of AI research and development, and they can't have humans check in on that process because that would slow them down too much. If you have a human do a week review every month of what's been going on and trying to interpret what's happening, this is this would slow them down substantially, and the competitor that doesn't do that will end up getting ahead. What that would mean is that you'd have basically AI development going very rapidly where there's nobody really checking what's going on or hardly checking. And I think a loss of control in that scenario is, is more likely.”

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