Anthropic’s AI doomsayer worked at Ripple

Anthropic employee Evan Hubinger earned 30 million X views on Wednesday by predicting the end of the world and putting the chance of AI killing all humans within a decade at above 10%.

However, before worrying about super intelligent AI agents going rogue, Hubinger worked at one of the world’s oldest crypto companies, Ripple.

Commenting on Hubinger’s viral claim, Galaxy Research’s Alex Thorn used his connection to Ripple and the XRP community to poke fun. The price of XRP today is still lower than its January 2018 high.

Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to. https://t.co/QAIHiFP3QZ

Hubinger’s resume notes that he worked for Ripple’s Software Engineering department. Years later, the company would seek financing at up to a $50 billion valuation, backing most of that valuation with its corporate XRP holdings.

Although Hubinger started working at Ripple while in school, his resume describes much mre than mere coffee duty. He claims that he “worked on designing Interledger, a trustless system for cross-currency transactions between arbitrary agents.”

Hubinger also boasts of other work at the company, claiming he “wrote a tool to do cryptographically secure wallets for financial institutions.” 

His LinkedIn adds work on the build process for rippled, server software powering parts of the XRP Ledger.

Hubinger now leads Anthropic’s Alignment stress-testing team. Its mandate is to prevent alignment failures by AI models, which is industry-speak for AI agents working on secret goals outside of the scope that humans specified.

Read more: AI sirens go fishing at XRP Las Vegas

Hubinger later clarified “To be clear, as we say in our latest Risk Report, I think the risk from present models is low. What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement.”

Recursivity refers to the ability of AI to train and generate new AI without human input.

Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has argued that AI safety rules could threaten freedom of speech.

Former Ripple Vice President Emi Yoshikawa wrote in August that AI extinction risk was becoming an everyday conversation topic in Silicon Valley.

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