The end of the world is AI? An existential threat
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What big questions does the episode open with about AI and existential risk?
The Economist.
Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor.
And I'm Jason Palmer.
Today on the show, the resurgence of oral culture and why Indians are getting into cheese.
First up, though.
Is the end of the world nigh? In AI, have we created the instrument of our own destruction? You might say those are pretty big questions. And in recent weeks, the possible extinction of humanity has moved to the front of the conversation. Yesterday, at a conference run by software firm Salesforce, even Sam Altman of OpenAI recognized the high stakes.
potential of a loss of control accident or some other serious thing that could go wrong. We have the potential of way too much power concentration and people fear that those developing AI could exert their worldview.
But surprise, surprise, there's some disagreement over who should be responsible for monitoring that risk. Dario Amadei of Anthropic seems to approve some form of collective action.
Let's make our practices better. Let's recommit to transparency. Let's invest more in safety. Then let's organize the rest of the industry and say, what can we do to set standards for everyone? What can we do to make everyone's standards better?
Jensen Huang of Chipmaker NVIDIA reckons there's no need for any government intervention.
We don't need any new laws. We don't need new regulations. We just need companies to decide that when it's, you know, run as fast as you can, but if you feel at any given point in time the company's out of control or the product's not going to be safe, you know, take a pause and make sure you get it right.
As for US President Donald Trump, he says greater safeguards simply aren't necessary. According to him, the fear of overpowerful AI is merely a hoax.
We're all talking about the imminent doom and destruction of the world, in large part because a single researcher resigned from Anthropic and said that he thought they might cause it.
Alex Hearn is The Economist's AI writer.
Jacob Coxon, a former open AI and anthropic researcher, left his job very loudly and publicly in early September, warning that AI safety really is an imminent and potentially existential threat to the world. Is he right, Alex? The interesting thing is the people who most agree with him are his former employers. Anthropix, Evan Hubinger, who leads the AI safety team, joined in with the conversation Cox had started on social media to say, basically, yeah. He put his own estimate as to the chance that the world ends due to AI at more than 10%, an astronomically high figure when you're talking about the destruction of everything.
We've been talking about how brilliant AI is for weeks, for months, almost for years. How did we get to this point where we suddenly think it's going to destroy us?
For a lot of us, I guess, people who spend a lot of time paying attention to what the AI world is saying and doing, there has been for a long time a thread in the AI world that looks at continued rapid improvements in the quality of the systems they are creating and extrapolates to what happens if that improvement doesn't stop. The reason why it's become alarming in 2026 is that for the last five plus years, the improvement hasn't stopped. And there is just less and less runway before you either work out what stops AI getting better or end up with AI that is very unsettlingly competent.
The alarm has been particularly sounded this year by the hugging face attack. Just tell me briefly what happened, why it was so shocking.
Sure. So the hugging face incident, as OpenAI euphemistically calls it, occurred when a swarm of AI agents controlled by OpenAI being put through the training and testing process occurred. attacked Hugging Face, a Franco-American AI company. They spent a weekend hacking into its systems, pretty comprehensively taking it apart to, it turns out, try and find out how to cheat on the coding test they'd been set. It was alarming for two reasons.
How did Sam Altman and industry leaders frame the danger of uncontrollable AI?
One is just that it was a tremendously successful hack of a multibillion dollar company.
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