Hundreds of AI Leaders Sign a One-Sentence Warning: The Technology Could Cause Human Extinction
The statement — 'Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war' — was signed by the heads of OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic, and by two of the field's founders.
A statement released this morning by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit in San Francisco, is twenty-two words long: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." The organizers say they kept it to one sentence so that people could agree with it without agreeing on anything else.
The list of names is the news. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, and Dario Amodei of Anthropic — the chief executives of the three leading labs — all signed. So did Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three researchers who won computing's highest award for inventing the underlying technology. So did hundreds of professors, several former heads of state, and a number of people who have spent years dismissing exactly this concern.
Extinction is a strong word, and the statement does not explain how. The people who signed it give different answers: some worry about AI making it easy to design weapons, some about systems that pursue goals nobody set, some simply about a technology this powerful in the hands of whoever gets there first. What they share is the view that the possibility is real enough to plan for.
The skeptics have a point too, and it is being made loudly today: the leaders of the companies building the technology are telling the world it might be apocalyptic, while continuing to build it. Either the warning is overstated, the critics say, or the behavior is inexcusable. The signers' reply is that they believe both — that it's dangerous, and that the danger is best managed by careful people getting there first. That is not a comfortable position. It is, as of this morning, the official one.