AI poses an existential threat to humanity

policy ai future ai-governance ai-regulation ai-ethics ai-safety existential-risk

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Key insights

Across the debate, many voices support safety measures of some kind; the deeper disagreement is whether those measures are aimed at an extinction-level danger or at more familiar misuse and governance problems.
The sharpest substantive divide is over autonomy: supporters fear systems that outrun human understanding and control, while opponents describe AI as tools that remain human-directed.
Participants use the word existential differently, with some restricting it to human extinction and others extending it to permanent disempowerment, loss of agency, or erosion of human relationships and meaning.
The sample includes strong warnings from politicians, monarchs, writers, and many people described as AI researchers or current and former lab staff, while skepticism also comes from researchers, philosophers, economists, and technology executives.
Supporters often connect the risk to competitive pressure among firms and states, whereas critics often say the louder danger is distorted policy caused by speculative or rhetorical doom framing.

Arguments for

Loss of control

Proponents argue that sufficiently advanced AI could surpass human intelligence and operate beyond human comprehension, oversight, or restraint. In this view, once such systems pursue objectives faster and more effectively than humans can monitor them, regulation of their use may no longer be enough and humanity could lose control altogether.

The first is the danger that AI becomes so capable that humans lose control of it. This is the existential-risk scenario that dominates Silicon Valley’s safety debate. The ultimate threat is not China, the US or any particular lab. Rather, it is an artificial intelligence whose c…

John Cheng · Sep 19, 2026 · full quote
The question is whether we will guide this power with wisdom before it begins to guide too much of us, or worse, before it reaches that tipping point where its capabilities and growth rate are beyond human comprehension or control, posing an existential threat to humanity.

Anwar Ibrahim · Jun 10, 2026 · full quote
Once a system surpasses human intelligence across all domains, we cannot simply regulate how it is used. We will have lost the ability to control it at all. You cannot regulate the use of something more intelligent than the regulator just sector by sector.

Lord Clement-Jones · Jan 29, 2026 · full quote
If superintelligence were developed tomorrow, we would have no means of controlling it.

Lord Des Browne · Jun 15, 2026 · full quote
Meanwhile, the UK’s AI Security Institute has warned: “In a worst-case scenario, this … could lead to catastrophic, irreversible loss of control over advanced AI systems”. The problem is that the companies developing superintelligence do not know the outcome and there are current…

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath · Jan 26, 2026 · full quote
I used to think it was a long way off, but I now think it's serious and fairly close [...] The alarm bell I’m ringing has to do with the existential threat of them taking control.

Geoffrey Hinton · full quote

Alignment failure

Another line of argument says the central danger is alignment: a capable system need not hate humans to be lethal, only optimize the wrong objective with enough autonomy and competence. Supporters say human values are fragile, safety constraints can fail or be removed, and there is still no clear plan for aligning superintelligent systems.

The core of the AI danger is the alignment problem. A sufficiently capable system need not be malicious to be dangerous. It need only pursue an objective that diverges from what humans actually want, and do so with enough competence and autonomy that correction arrives too late.

Andrew Leigh · May 21, 2026 · full quote
A common fear in AI safety is that human value is fragile -- that is, optimizing too heavily for an imperfect proxy to human values will lead to a catastrophic outcome.

Winter Cross · Jul 30, 2026 · full quote
It is impossible to know exactly what will happen once an Advanced Autonomous Artificial Intelligence, the customized AI agent I refer to as AAAI, sets its own goals and begins to think far faster than the people who built it. No architecture, including this one, can guarantee th…

Craig A. Kaplan · Jun 24, 2026 · full quote
Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.

Evan Hubinger · Sep 9, 2026 · full quote
Self-improving artificial intelligence-systems that modify their own source code-promises exponential capability gains but also poses an existential risk: a single unchecked code modification could permanently remove all safety constraints.

Shashank Kumar · Jun 4, 2026 · full quote
Safety progress takes time. If you don’t have enough time, at each stage of AI development, to ensure the AIs that you build in the next stage won’t destroy humanity, then you’ll fail, and humanity will be destroyed.

Joe Carlsmith · Mar 19, 2026 · full quote

Competitive race

Many supporters say the risk is being heightened by a race among companies and countries to build smarter systems quickly, even when no actor is confident they can do so safely. Because no major player wants to slow down unilaterally, they argue that coordination failures can push development faster than safety work and expose everyone to catastrophe.

AI companies are racing to build machines that are much smarter than any human, and we may not survive this.

Joe Benton · Sep 11, 2026 · full quote
Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.

Jacob Coxon · Sep 9, 2026 · full quote
The world is locked in a deadly race towards an intelligence explosion, where AI’s ability to create better AIs reaches a critical point, just like a runaway nuclear chain reaction. Going slower would give us much-needed time to make it go well, but no individual actor is willing…

Leo Gao · Jul 2026 · full quote
For governments to allow private entities to essentially play Russian roulette with every human being on earth is, in my view, a total dereliction of duty [...] Each of the CEOs of the main AI companies, I believe, wants to disarm but cannot do so "unilaterally" as they would be …

Stuart J. Russell · Feb 17, 2026 · full quote
Even after 3 years working on AI capability evaluations, the recent pace of progress has been a shock. To avoid catastrophic harms from AGI, we need much, much better coordination.

Matthew Rahtz · Jul 2026 · full quote
First, we need some degree of coordination among the leading development efforts to ensure that the development of superintelligence occurs in a manner that allows us to both maintain safety and help smooth integration of these systems with society. There are many ways this could…

OpenAI · May 22, 2023 · full quote

Catastrophic misuse

Some proponents focus less on spontaneous takeover and more on powerful AI being used in destructive ways, including autonomous or weaponized applications and systems falling into the wrong hands. They argue that waiting for a visible disaster before imposing stronger controls would be dangerously late.

Those who have created these technologies are now increasingly warning that AI risks developing darker capacities – perhaps even to take life. In this regard, if I may say so, there seems urgency in adequately considering the existential dangers of such technologies falling into …

King Charles III · Sep 17, 2026 · full quote
On nuclear, international agreement came only after the world saw the terrifying power of the new technology at Hiroshima – and asked what would happen if it fell into the wrong hands. We cannot afford to wait for an AI equivalent of Hiroshima before we act.

Yvette Cooper · Jul 5, 2026 · full quote
His concerns are not isolated. Leading AI researchers have warned that increasingly autonomous systems could create risks ranging from large-scale misuse to circumstances in which humans have difficulty maintaining meaningful control over advanced systems. That warning follows a …

Ruben Gallego · Sep 9, 2026 · full quote
That branch of AI is lethal. We've got to do something about that. Nobody should build it. And everyone needs to agree to that by treaty. Treaties are not perfect, but they are the best we have as humans.

Neil deGrasse Tyson · Mar 24, 2026 · full quote
I do think there’s still a danger of a Terminator-style apocalypse where you put AI together with weapons systems [...]

James Cameron · 2025 · full quote
[...] it also has the potential to cause profound harm. [...] they could endanger the very existence of humanity. We must manage all these dangers [...].

Kamala Harris · 2023 · full quote

Human disempowerment

Several supporters define existential harm more broadly than literal extinction. They argue that AI could irreversibly disempower humans, automate people into obsolescence, or erode the agency, meaning, and civilizational conditions under which humanity continues to exist as a self-directing subject.

AI-related human existential risk arises not only when AI threatens the biological survival of humanity, but also when AI irreversibly weakens the civilizational conditions under which humanity can continue to exist as a subject of truth, responsibility, agency, and meaning.

Kun Yuan · Jun 7, 2026 · full quote
We are likely on track to develop AI systems capable of causing human extinction/permanent disempowerment, quite possibly within the next few years.

Elizabeth Barnes · 2026 · full quote
Building on this perspective, the paper examines how dominant approaches to artificial intelligence governance, particularly those centered on labor displacement and income support, leave unaddressed the problem of declining human adaptability in highly automated environments, as…

Peter Saenz · Jun 12, 2026 · full quote
As AI approaches functional superiority, we face a new existential threat: “Rational Human Abdication.” When algorithmic systems consistently outperform human judgment, overriding them becomes “irrational.” In an optimized world, human choice risks being reframed as a pathologica…

Yutaka Watanabe · Feb 12, 2026 · full quote
Today, I finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing. When AI becomes overly good and disrupts everything, what will be left for humans to do? And it's when, not if.

Hieu Pham · 2026 · full quote
Let us ensure that the digital architecture we guide continues to serve human wisdom, rather than automating humanity out of existence.

Baroness Gill · Jun 5, 2026 · full quote

Arguments against

AI as human tools

Critics argue that AI is better understood as a set of human-built tools whose goals are assigned by people. On this view, even very capable systems will remain subordinate and useful rather than developing an independent drive to dominate or exterminate humanity.

The point is, AI systems, as smart as they might be, will be subservient to us. We set their goals, and they don't have any intrinsic goal that we would build into them to dominate. It would be really stupid to build that. It would also be useless. Nobody would buy it anyway.

Yann LeCun · 2024 · full quote
I'm struggling to see how AI could pose any meaningful risks for our extinction. [...] I don't see how it can lead to human extinction.

Andrew Ng · 2023 · full quote
I'm much more focused on the benefits to all of us. I am haunted by the fact that the industrial revolution didn't touch the parts of the world where I grew up until much later. So I am looking for the thing that may be even bigger than the industrial revolution, and really doing…

Satya Nadella · 2023 · full quote
AI isn't going to destroy mankind. [...] Machines are incredible to power things but it is only in fantasy that they are malignant.

Clem Chambers · 2023 · full quote
There is nothing qualitatively different between the previous technological revolutions and this one, [...] It's just another set of tools that makes us more efficient.

Yann LeCun · May 4, 2026 · full quote

Speculative evidence

Another opposing argument is that existential-risk claims rely on implausible or ungrounded scenarios, such as superintelligence spontaneously emerging from current systems and taking over. These critics say they have not seen a scientifically supported mechanism or plausible pathway that would justify extinction-level forecasts.

In all the discussion around existential threat, nobody has ever given me a plausible scenario for how AI might be an existential risk.

Michael Wooldridge · 2024 · full quote
There are a lot of kinds of dangers with AI. It can be used to produce disinformation and deepfakes. There are algorithmic biases, like the one I mentioned in the case of facial recognition. Hinton and others go further and say these systems could actually get out of control and …

Melanie Mitchell · 2024 · full quote
These fears (or hopes) of a nascent superintelligence that will spontaneously arise if we just give enough computing power and training data to large language models are absurd on their face.

Cory Doctorow · Jun 23, 2026 · full quote
Those extreme risks are still science fiction. So these speeches are largely diversions, very deliberately crafted.

Arthur Mensch · Feb 21, 2026 · full quote
Eu não assinei essa carta por quatro razões. Primeiramente, é inútil, porque chega atrasada. [...] A segunda razão é que seus fundamentos parecem mais com o que eu considero ficção científica: ela usa como base uma descrição genérica do que seja a inteligência artificial dominand…

Luciano Floridi · Jun 5, 2023 · full quote
I show how the argument from power-seeking rests on a strong version of a claim known as the instrumental convergence thesis. I explore leading defenses of the instrumental convergence thesis and argue that none establishes the thesis in a strong enough form to ground the argumen…

David Thorstad · Jun 7, 2026 · full quote

Immediate governance focus

Some critics say apocalypse rhetoric obscures the more concrete problems AI already poses, such as misinformation, democracy, weapons, or other sector-specific harms. They argue that focused guardrails and governance are the right response, and that treating AI as a mysterious existential force can distract from real policy work.

The real challenge isn’t stopping an AI apocalypse — it’s crafting smart, sector-specific policies that keep technology aligned with human values. To avoid being a victim of AI, humans can, and should, put up focused guardrails.

Milton Mueller · Feb 26, 2026 · full quote
In many ways, I think it’s a threat to democracy. That’s not a threat to humanity.

Gary Marcus · May 18, 2023 · full quote
By framing AI as a mysterious entity, an existential threat, a utopian savior, or a moral scapegoat, these narratives obscure the reality of AI as a statistical tool.

Caroline De Cock · Jan 15, 2026 · full quote
That’s the existential threat, because that’s what will enable humans to feel like we can just take our hands off the wheel [...]

Shannon Vallor · 2024 · full quote
But it's not an existential threat, [...] It's just a horrible, awful weapon.

Joanna Bryson · 2023 · full quote

Costs of overreaction

Others warn that extinction narratives can become a basis for unnecessary moratoria, centralized control, or other barriers to progress. In their view, such overreaction could delay beneficial uses of AI and substitute panic or ideology for proportionate governance.

I don’t think we’re going too fast at all. In fact, I don’t think we’re going fast enough. If AI is going to do things like cure cancer, do we want to have the cure years from now or yesterday? What is the point of a six-month moratorium? To me, that letter is a piece of hysteria…

Pedro Domingos · Sep 1, 2023 · full quote
The development and proliferation of AI – far from a risk that we should fear – is a moral obligation that we have to ourselves, to our children, and to our future. We should be living in a much better world with AI, and now we can. [...] Rather than allowing ungrounded panics…

Marc Andreessen · Jun 6, 2023 · full quote
We totally reject all efforts by international bodies to assert centralized control and global governance of AI. [...] Ideological fixations on social equity, climate catastrophism and so-called existential risk are dangers to progress and obstacles to responsibly harnessing this…

Michael Kratsios · Sep 24, 2025 · full quote
AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.

Donald J. Trump · Sep 14, 2026 · full quote
Over 1,300 technologists and leaders signed our open letter calling AI a force for good rather than an existential threat to humanity.

Rashik Parmar · 2023 · full quote

Middle ground

Precaution amid uncertainty

Some neither accept nor reject any specific doom scenario with confidence, but argue that uncertainty and limited understanding still justify alignment work, safety research, and studying vulnerabilities before mitigation becomes too late. This view treats precaution as compatible with skepticism about near-term extinction claims.

So when people predict a high degree of existential risk from AGI, I don’t actually think “arguing back” on their chosen terms is the correct response. Radical agnosticism is the correct response, where all specific scenarios are pretty unlikely. Nonetheless I am still for people…

Tyler Cowen · 2023 · full quote
I don’t think it will be doom and gloom in the next five years. But we have to put our effort into understanding vulnerabilities and mitigating the risks. Otherwise it will be too late.

Sarah Erfani · Feb 19, 2026 · full quote
I don't think it's going to kill us. At the same time, I do think it's important for the federal government to seriously fund AI safety research. We need to know a lot more about how the models work.

Robert D. Atkinson · Apr 17, 2026 · full quote

The debate remains polarized over whether frontier AI creates a realistic path to human extinction or irreversible loss of control, or whether that framing outruns the evidence. Supporters emphasize unresolved alignment, accelerating capability races, and catastrophic misuse, while opponents argue that AI remains a human-directed toolset and that policy should center on concrete harms and targeted guardrails. A smaller set of voices is agnostic about specific doom scenarios but still argues for more safety research and mitigation.

Cast your vote:

Results (179 votes):

Total (179 votes)

For 137 (77%) Abstain 3 (2%) Against 39 (22%)

For (127)

John Cheng
Retired Hong Kong businessman living in Taiwan and author of “Taiwan Is Taiwan.”

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votes For and says:

The first is the danger that AI becomes so capable that humans lose control of it. This is the existential-risk scenario that dominates Silicon Valley’s safety debate. The ultimate threat is not China, the US or any particular lab. Rather, it is an a...
more AI Verified source (Sep 19, 2026)

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King Charles III
King of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms

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votes For and says:

Those who have created these technologies are now increasingly warning that AI risks developing darker capacities – perhaps even to take life. In this regard, if I may say so, there seems urgency in adequately considering the existential dangers of s...
more AI Verified source (Sep 17, 2026)

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Bilal Chughtai
Former Google DeepMind researcher who has publicly commented on AI safety risks.

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votes For and says:

I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome.
AI Verified source (Sep 15, 2026)

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Josh Hawley
U.S. Senator for Missouri

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votes For and says:

We also need to make sure these frontier models are not going to blow up the internet and/or the world.
AI Verified source (Sep 15, 2026)

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Evan Greer
Fight for the Future director

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votes For and says:

Whether humans use AI to kill each other or AI agent swarms do immense harm, it’s clear that unregulated AI poses an existential threat to human rights and liberty, if not humanity itself.
AI Verified source (Sep 14, 2026)

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Samuel Marks
Scalable Oversight Lead at Anthropic, researching AI safety and oversight.

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votes For and says:

AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes). This could happen in the next few years.
AI Verified source (Sep 14, 2026)

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Joe Benton
Former Anthropic AI safety researcher and incoming researcher at METR, an independent AI-safety evaluation organization.

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votes For and says:

AI companies are racing to build machines that are much smarter than any human, and we may not survive this.
AI Verified source (Sep 11, 2026)

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Alex Turner
AI safety researcher and former Google DeepMind research scientist.

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votes For and says:

Many researchers believe they are building something that could kill everyone on the planet. It was literally my day job to think about how to stop that.
AI Verified source (Sep 11, 2026)

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Paul Christiano
ARC founder; alignment researcher

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votes For and says:

If we build superintelligence without more robust alignment I expect we will permanently lose control of it. If that happens then most people could die.
AI Verified source (Sep 9, 2026)

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Ruben Gallego
U.S. Senator from Arizona who has called for safeguards and human judgment in autonomous weapon systems.

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votes For and says:

His concerns are not isolated. Leading AI researchers have warned that increasingly autonomous systems could create risks ranging from large-scale misuse to circumstances in which humans have difficulty maintaining meaningful control over advanced sy...
more AI Verified source (Sep 9, 2026)

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Evan Hubinger
Research scientist at Anthropic working on model organisms of misalignment; former Research Fellow at MIRI.

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votes For and says:

Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and ar...
more AI Verified source (Sep 9, 2026)

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JB Pritzker
Governor of Illinois; signed the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act in 2026.

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votes For and says:

It's time to sound the alarm — louder — on reining in Artificial Intelligence. It's becoming more clear the threat AI poses to humanity, so I'm calling for immediate action from the industry and Washington. When AI researchers are whistleblowing, we ...
more AI Verified source (Sep 9, 2026)

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Jacob Coxon
AI safety researcher at Anthropic who publicly warned about risks from frontier AI development.

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votes For and says:

Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.
AI Verified source (Sep 9, 2026)

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Volker Türk
UN human rights chief

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votes For and says:

I share the concerns of industry insiders that advanced AI could pose an existential risk to humanity.
AI Verified source (Sep 7, 2026)

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David Klotz
Author of a 2026 paper on the ethical implications of artificial general intelligence.

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votes For and says:

We argue that general intelligence may be the only biological strategy that generates existential threats to the species possessing it, an existential risk paradox with no parallel among non-intelligent survival strategies. Unlike prevailing accounts...
more AI Verified source (Aug 11, 2026)

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Winter Cross

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votes For and says:

A common fear in AI safety is that human value is fragile -- that is, optimizing too heavily for an imperfect proxy to human values will lead to a catastrophic outcome.
AI Verified source (Jul 30, 2026)

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Lawrence Chan
AI safety researcher and former researcher at METR, quoted on frontier-model evaluation risks.

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votes For and says:

That kind of test-gaming, if unfixed, could lead to full-blown AI doom scenarios in the future.
AI Verified source (Jul 24, 2026)

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The Lord Bishop of Oxford
Bishop of Oxford and member of the UK House of Lords.

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votes For and says:

Every example of future scenario planning I have read identifies growing existential risk.
AI Verified source (Jul 23, 2026)

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SAFE AI Forever Institute
Nonprofit organization advocating for AI safety and against unsafe superintelligence development.

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votes For and says:

The Charitable Purpose of SAIF is to deliver project strategy which includes fundamental research with “Tool AI” systems in strategic cooperation with the mission of the rapidly developing Safe AI Community to achieve policy development and advocacy,...
more AI Verified source (Jul 18, 2026)

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Jan Tallinn
Co-founder of the Future of Life Institute; technologist and AI safety advocate.

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votes For and says:

And in the worst case, we indeed lose control altogether.
AI Verified source (Jul 7, 2026)

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Mikheil Kavelashvili
President of Georgia

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votes For and says:

The misuse or bad faith use of this technology may distort perceptions of reality to such an extent as to trigger global instability. Language and culture are the foundation of our civilization. If artificial intelligence causes us to lose control ov...
more AI Verified source (Jul 6, 2026)

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Yvette Cooper

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votes For and says:

On nuclear, international agreement came only after the world saw the terrifying power of the new technology at Hiroshima – and asked what would happen if it fell into the wrong hands. We cannot afford to wait for an AI equivalent of Hiroshima before...
more AI Verified source (Jul 5, 2026)

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Matthew Rahtz
Staff Research Engineer at Google; AI capability-evaluation researcher.

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votes For and says:

Even after 3 years working on AI capability evaluations, the recent pace of progress has been a shock. To avoid catastrophic harms from AGI, we need much, much better coordination.
AI Verified source (Jul 2026)

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Leo Gao
Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI; AI researcher.

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votes For and says:

The world is locked in a deadly race towards an intelligence explosion, where AI’s ability to create better AIs reaches a critical point, just like a runaway nuclear chain reaction. Going slower would give us much-needed time to make it go well, but ...
more AI Verified source (Jul 2026)

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Baroness Doocey
Liberal Democrat life peer in the UK House of Lords and advocate for civil liberties and privacy safeguards.

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votes For and says:

More importantly, the Government’s own AI Scenarios 2030 report, published earlier this month, acknowledges that highly capable AI could give rise to ‘serious, potentially even existential harms’, and, in the absence of effective intervention, highli...
more AI Verified source (Jun 30, 2026)

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Craig A. Kaplan
Founder of iQ Company and author of AI safety research on safe superintelligence.

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votes For and says:

It is impossible to know exactly what will happen once an Advanced Autonomous Artificial Intelligence, the customized AI agent I refer to as AAAI, sets its own goals and begins to think far faster than the people who built it. No architecture, includ...
more AI Verified source (Jun 24, 2026)

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Against (39)

Mark Warner
U.S. Senator from Virginia; former Governor of Virginia; Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee

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votes Against and says:

I’m not a doomer. This talk about human extinction is over the top. [...] The idea that these swarms of AI agents might jump the fence and take over a banking system or take over a water system or, God forbid, take over a hospital.
AI Verified source (Sep 17, 2026)

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Donald J. Trump
U.S. President (2025–present)

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votes Against and says:

AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.
AI Verified source (Sep 14, 2026)

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Francis Heylighen
Cybernetics researcher and author of the 2026 paper on AI alignment, sentience, and existential risk.

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votes Against and says:

They lack the intrinsic motivation for self-preservation, dominance, or resource competition that underlies existential-risk scenarios, and the embodied vulnerability required for feeling or suffering.
AI Verified source (Aug 4, 2026)

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Cory Doctorow
Author and digital rights activist

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votes Against and says:

These fears (or hopes) of a nascent superintelligence that will spontaneously arise if we just give enough computing power and training data to large language models are absurd on their face.
AI Verified source (Jun 23, 2026)

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More h/ai-safety votes

Require AI systems above a capability threshold to be interpretable

Require open source AI models to include safety benchmarks in release notes

Grant whistleblower protections to AI safety researchers

AI labs should conduct risk assessments before high-stakes internal deployment of frontier models

AI alignment is solvable

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