A New Report Sheds Light on the Secretive Race to Build Self-Improving AI

The report, exclusively shared with TIME ahead of its publication, emphasizes that AI companies are “actively working on” automating all parts of the AI development pipeline, including generating new ideas, running experiments to test those ideas, and interpreting the results. Most of the insiders Gladstone spoke to “believe RSI will start within the next 3 to 12 months, and possibly sooner, assuming there’s no U.S. government intervention or slowdown,” the report states. 

“There’s a fair amount of [disaster] prepping and bio-bunker purchasing going on” among these researchers, says Edouard Harris, Gladstone’s chief technology officer. 

The aim of the report, Gladstone’s executives tell TIME, is to give lawmakers a better understanding of how RSI works, and, in turn, a greater ability to regulate it.

“Our goal here was to define recursive self-improvement well enough that people can have a sane conversation about it, especially in Washington,” says Jeremie Harris, Gladstone’s CEO. (The pair are brothers.) “There are all these bills proposed to ban superintelligence, which are really interesting attempts to grapple with this problem. But what we’re more interested in is: what is the process that needs to be regulated?”