THE boss of leader US artificial-intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has called for a slowdown in the development of new systems to give safety measures time to catch up.

If the industry doesn’t slam on the brakes, chief executive Dario Amodei warned in a post on his website, within six to 12 months, AI could be capable of leading a swarm of agents that could take over the entire internet.

Watchdogs have been urging the AI sector for years to slow its development for safety reasons, but pressure has been building recently as industry workers resign and accuse their companies of not acting responsibly.

Mr Amodei offered a plan to increase checks on the industry, some of which would require co-ordination across the broad industry and with governments around the world.

“I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,” he said.

Concerns have grown for years about a possible superintelligence that could escape the control of humanity, said Future of Life Institute president and chief executive Anthony Aguirre, who called for a six-month pause for the industry’s development in 2023.

“It’s pretty much become clear to the world and even the AI companies that they’re not really prepared to control the AI systems they’re racing to create,” he said.

Anthropic said two days before that it had blocked efforts to use its AI models for malicious activity, such as cyberattacks, surveillance and research that could have led to biological weapons.

United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk urged countries earlier this week to put “cast-iron guarantees in place around the safety and security of AI before it is too late.”