Doomsday forecasts about artificial intelligence are an invitation for Australia to floor the accelerator on the technology, a former US ambassador says.
The comments came barely a day after Anthropic and OpenAI bosses urged a "pacing" including independent monitoring of AI models and global regulation.
But diplomat-turned-Anthropic special envoy Jeff Bleich, whose boss Dario Amodei penned the essay sounding the alarm, was resiliently optimistic.
"It's not as though pacing requires slowing down," he said during a fireside chat on AI hosted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra.
"If anything, you need to accelerate because you need even more compute for the research related to safety and staying ahead of the models."
Riffing off quotes from former US presidents, Washington's former ambassador to Australia said Anthropic relished doing business under robust regulation.
"We didn't come here because it's easy. We came here because we knew you would make it hard," he said on Monday.
"The biggest thing we have to fear is fear itself," he added in a tongue-in-cheek reference to Franklin D Roosevelt, who railed against society-wide paralysis caused by massive economic upheaval.
The "fireside chat" was a favourite public relations tool of World War II-era commander-in-chief Roosevelt.
Mr Bleich also brushed away concerns about bots coming for white-collar jobs en masse.
"When cars came along, it was predictable that people wouldn't need as many horseshoes and stables," he said.
"On the other hand, there were all sorts of new jobs that came along with it."
However, Digital Economy Assistant Minister Andrew Charlton earlier flagged AI posed thorny questions to the core of Australia's economy.
"Australia has been very good as a nation ... at making the unfashionable end of the value chain work for us," Dr Charlton said.
"I'm not sure that same strategy of playing at the bottom of the supply chain is going to work in the same way.
"It means talking to the data centres that come here about bringing their researchers here; it means talking to the big AI companies that locate in Australia."
Opposition industry spokesperson Andrew Hastie, who also spoke at the conference, claimed Australia was "not even on the start line" of a global arms race between five "hyperscalers", including the US and China.
Greens leader Sarah Hanson-Young accused the government of lacking urgency around guardrails after her colleague David Shoebridge claimed Labor was in denial about the technology's dangers.
"When the three leading CEOs of AI companies are telling you there’s a problem with the hyper speed of AI, it's time for governments to listen," she said in a statement on Monday.
"The government has rightly acknowledged the need for a regulatory framework but ... they are dragging their feet."
Labor frontbenchers at the conference maintained the party's yet-to-be legislated AI framework would be more than a match for the technology's potential future dangers.
