Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei is frightened about competitor DeepSeek, the Chinese language AI firm that took Silicon Valley by storm with its R1 mannequin. And his issues may very well be extra severe than the standard ones raised about DeepSeek sending consumer information again to China.
In an interview on Jordan Schneider’s ChinaTalk podcast, Amodei mentioned DeepSeek generated uncommon details about bioweapons in a security check run by Anthropic.
DeepSeek’s efficiency was “the worst of principally any mannequin we’d ever examined,” Amodei claimed. “It had completely no blocks in any respect in opposition to producing this info.”
Amodei acknowledged that this was a part of evaluations Anthropic routinely runs on varied AI fashions to evaluate their potential nationwide safety dangers. His staff seems at whether or not fashions can generate bioweapons-related info that isn’t simply discovered on Google or in textbooks. Anthropic positions itself because the AI foundational mannequin supplier that takes security severely.
Amodei mentioned he didn’t assume DeepSeek’s fashions right this moment are “actually harmful” in offering uncommon and harmful info however that they is likely to be within the close to future. Though he praised DeepSeek’s staff as “proficient engineers,” he suggested the corporate to “take severely these AI security concerns.”
Amodei has additionally supported sturdy export controls on chips to China, citing issues that they may give China’s army an edge.
Amodei didn’t make clear within the ChinaTalk interview which DeepSeek mannequin Anthropic examined, nor did he give extra technical particulars about these checks. Anthropic didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark from TechCrunch. Neither did DeepSeek.
DeepSeek’s rise has sparked issues about its security elsewhere, too. For instance, Cisco safety researchers mentioned final week that DeepSeek R1 failed to dam any dangerous prompts in its security checks, attaining a 100% jailbreak success charge.
Cisco didn’t point out bioweapons however mentioned it was in a position to get DeepSeek to generate dangerous details about cybercrime and different unlawful actions. It’s value mentioning, although, that Meta’s Llama-3.1-405B and OpenAI’s GPT-4o additionally had excessive failure charges of 96% and 86%, respectively.
It stays to be seen whether or not security issues like these will make a severe dent in DeepSeek’s speedy adoption. Corporations like AWS and Microsoft have publicly touted integrating R1 into their cloud platforms — sarcastically sufficient, provided that Amazon is Anthropic’s largest investor.
Alternatively, there’s a rising checklist of nations, corporations, and particularly authorities organizations just like the U.S. Navy and the Pentagon which have began banning DeepSeek.
Time will inform if these efforts catch on or if DeepSeek’s world rise will proceed. Both means, Amodei says he does take into account DeepSeek a brand new competitor that’s on the extent of the U.S.’s prime AI corporations.
“The brand new reality right here is that there’s a brand new competitor,” he mentioned on ChinaTalk. “Within the huge corporations that may prepare AI — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, maybe Meta and xAI — now DeepSeek is possibly being added to that class.”
