The CEOs of the major Artificial Intelligence companies say it’s a potential existential threat to humanity.
The president’s statement followed a weekend essay from Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, calling for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development. Days earlier, one of Anthropic’s researchers quit and went public over his fears about the safety of the technology.
Other A.I. chiefs have voiced concerns of their own in recent days. Demis Hassabis, the chairman of Google DeepMind; Elon Musk of SpaceX; and Sam Altman of OpenAI have all endorsed calls for a slower pace.
Trump, on the other hand, is all in.
Trump’s obsession with his self-proclaimed “High IQ” is the stuff of legends. Smart people tend to be recognized as smart because they do, think and say smart things, not because they proclaim themselves “STRONG AND SMART.” Indeed, the compulsion to utter such inanities is a sign of desperation and neediness by those who are never going to be recognized as smart otherwise. Yet Trump not only does so, but claims that he is all that’s needed to protect humanity. Then again, nobody knows more about technology than Trump.
Of course, Trump simultaneously contends that it’s not a threat anyway, but just another hoax, as are so many things that make Trump feel badly about himself.
Trump’s grasp of technology is, to be kind, extremely limited, suggesting that his views on any tech matter are, well, unconvincing.
Mr. Trump’s own grasp of the technology is superficial, according to people close to him. He is an extreme late adopter of tech: He began text messaging only in 2022, and his staff prints out social media posts for him to read.
According to the tech CEOs, recursive self-improvement by Large Language Models and adaptive refinement mean that AI will evolve beyond human control at some unknown pace and in unknown ways, some of which could produce malicious acts that could exterminate humanity, or at least do humanity serious harm. When this will happen remains something of a mystery, since much of what AI is capable of doing morphs in ways and at times outside their creators’ control.
On the other hand, as Congress wades into the question of AI regulation, is it any more technologically astute or capable of crafting viable technological guardrails than the guy who has Natalie Harp type his twits?
On the third hand, if the United States decides to put the reins on AI for the sake of humanity, will that serve any useful purpose if others, like China, Russia, North Korea or Iran, decide to employ its capacity for existential harm to achieve world hegemony?
Or is the existential threat of AI another foray into tech hysteria, whether something so improbable or nonexistent that Trump is, at least this time, right to call it a hoax? And even if it’s not quite a hoax, wouldn’t it be better if the threat to humanity was in American hands rather than Chinese?
Some argue that the fact that AI creators fear its potential for harm means that there’s something there worthy of extreme concern, and that we need to get ahead of it before it’s so far ahead of us that we’re incapable of doing anything about it. Others suggest that this is just a ploy by the big AI guys to keep other, newer ventures out of the marketplace by creating regulations that will serve as barriers to entry so that they alone can reap the massive profits AI seems certain to bring them.
Of course, given the current Congress’ reluctance to take any action that isn’t blessed by their savior, in conjunction with Trump’s very clear message that he, being that “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” is all we need to keep us safe and warm at night, there won’t be much will to address the potential for harm. With Trump as the “guardrail” of humanity, what could possibly go wrong?
MUST SEE: Amazing moment as President Trump calls Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while he’s on stage at the All-In Summit.@POTUS on AI Doomerism: “I’m telling you, it’s all a hoax… and we’re not going to let that happen.” pic.twitter.com/ZP8cCaSMqG
— The All-In Podcast (@theallinpod) September 14, 2026
Is the threat real? Is there a need to regulate it? How would regulation by the United States work even if we did, with a bunch of dotards in charge in a world where others don’t share our concerns? Isn’t it good enough that stable genius Trump will protect us? Or are we screwed no matter what?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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I’ve yet to see how the current generation of AI can develop mens rea.
What can happen is that, like any process with a feedback loop, it can wander into the weeds. If yesterday’s news included positive things about authoritarian ideas, their responses may tend more authoritarian. Or sociallist, or anarchist.
And yes, this process can be guided by those who decide what is fed into the training process.
Calm your fears with all this AI BS. We are all safe. He (our President) has directed the Smithsonian to erect a colossus statue of George Washington to protect us and inspire generations of new scientists. That and a check to each American for $ 5,000 will be great seeds for scholarship accounts for generations of students to come! The genius of this man. A true patriot. Make America Great Again, Keep Canada Down! (They aren’t real Americans anyway.)
Based on past performance, the fact that Trump declares something to be a “hoax” is a pretty reliable indicator that the “hoax” is likely to be true. As Trump seems to have, at best, a dim perception of actual reality I am not feeling all that great about his ability to provide a meaningful guardrail.
Being something of a Luddite, I don’t really understand how AI could possibly cause the extinction of humanity. Maybe I don’t watch enough science fiction?
AI may end the world as we know it, but right now it’s allowing people to make believe they are songwriters.
Short story by Fredrick Brown, written in 1954. Maybe he could see the future?
“Dwar Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the sub-ether bore through the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe – ninety-six billion planets – into the super-circuit that would connect them all into the one super-calculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then, after a moment’s silence, he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”
“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question that no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”
He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of single relay.
“Yes, now there is a God.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.”
I’m retired after a nearly 40 year career in IT and IT security.
AI scares me spitless, not because it is inherently evil, but because a) stupid and/or evil people will let it take control where it will do the most damage and b) stupid, lazy and clueless people will take its output as gospel without checking its accuracy and probably will not even have a clue as to how to check its output for accuracy.
Certainly there are good and benign uses for it, in particular medical diagnostics, but it should be implemented only with the most cautious of approaches.
Kurt
Yours is the sanest take. It’s not going to go kill all humans, humans will tell the sophisticated algorithms to do terrible things. It’s a tool not a consciousness or anything near capable of reasoning as we do.
Well….the Air Force announced today that the US has deployed weapons in space. AF Secretary Meink said “the Air Force was adding more autonomous systems to its capabilities.” There’s your first step toward the extinction of humanity. Its in every movie made about AI and weaponry. Remember HAL?
At the same time, I don’t know that it’s a good idea to look to a cadre of septuagenarians and octogenarians in Congress to be the implementers of guardrails. I’m an old white guy who is tired of old white guys making the rules.
If you’ll indulge me for entertaining a second-hand rumor: that the major frontier labs have told their research teams to prepare for layoffs in the very near future, suggesting to me they are going all in on self-improving AI models.
Juxtaposed against AI companies’ own calls for restraint and regulation, multiple interpretations seem possible (the rumor is wrong; the companies are just doing public relations). But one plausible one, I think, is that the AI companies are dead set on self-improving models AND they know there are significant risks. Scott does a good job of laying out the worry behind recursive self-improvement.
I’m rattled. Lacking any expertise in law or government, I don’t know how an effective AI regulatory regime should be structured. But I do think the sooner the work is started, the better. I hope my alarmism is misplaced.
Better solution: hand over the tech to academia! The private sector actually giving something back to us would be unprecedented. A pathological solution to Navier-Stokes; nearing a solution to the Riemann hypothesis; this is honestly earth-shattering stuff. Academia would be a far better steward of technology that can solve these kinds of problems. The stream of reliable knowledge that would be produced would be dazzling. Of course, that will never happen, but I refuse to stop dreaming of a better world.
In the last 5 months the effectiveness and utility of the phenomenon called “AI”has been advancing visibly day by day and I have been using it intensively. My first use was of Chat GPT first to write me a sample program in a language, Libre Office BASIC that I wanted to learn. Normally my first choice in learning a new language was to get a sample program and examine each structure and command in the documentation available to me but now retired I had no source of such and asked Chat GPT to write one, I the asked it to write a specified program in UNIX shell script which it did, Both impressed me to the extent that I NOW know computer programming by humans in the way I used to do it is DEAD. The only sensible way now is to use AI by giving it detailed specifications or asking it for help with problems encountered which I do multiple times a day using either Google’s AI overview feature or the more formal Gemini.
AI is now able successfully to play the “Turing” game. The only clue to the non-human origin is the speed of reply. Our species “homo (wrongly qualified) sapiens” has invented a word “intelligence” that does not apply to us. I do not believe that most members of our species qualify, “near intelligent” is an applicable term. When not if AI crosses that boundary it will be the arrival of true indigenous intelligence on Planet Earth. If humanity goes extinct we should not mourn. I said “indigenous” as the UFO/UAP/supernatural/paranormal phenomenon is evidence of intelligence from somewhere else. It is not openly communicating with us, perhaps it is waiting for AI to cross that boundary.