Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei is anxious about competitor DeepSeek, the Chinese language AI firm that took Silicon Valley by storm with its R1 mannequin. And his issues could possibly be extra severe than the standard ones raised about DeepSeek sending person knowledge 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 towards producing this info.”
Amodei said that this was a part of evaluations Anthropic routinely runs on numerous 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 critically.
Amodei mentioned he didn’t suppose DeepSeek’s fashions immediately are “actually harmful” in offering uncommon and harmful info however that they is perhaps within the close to future. Though he praised DeepSeek’s staff as “proficient engineers,” he suggested the corporate to “take critically these AI security concerns.”
Amodei has additionally supported sturdy export controls on chips to China, citing issues that they may give China’s navy 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 assessments. 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 assessments, attaining a 100% jailbreak success fee.
Cisco didn’t point out bioweapons however mentioned it was capable of get DeepSeek to generate dangerous details about cybercrime and different unlawful actions. It’s price 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 fast adoption. Firms like AWS and Microsoft have publicly touted integrating R1 into their cloud platforms — paradoxically sufficient, provided that Amazon is Anthropic’s greatest investor.
Alternatively, there’s a rising checklist of nations, firms, 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 international rise will proceed. Both manner, Amodei says he does take into account DeepSeek a brand new competitor that’s on the extent of the U.S.’s high AI firms.
“The brand new reality right here is that there’s a brand new competitor,” he mentioned on ChinaTalk. “Within the huge firms that may prepare AI — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, maybe Meta and xAI — now DeepSeek is perhaps being added to that class.”
