The AI Doomsday Chorus: Every Major Voice Warning Of Extinction By 2030

Here is the detail that ought to stop everyone cold. The people racing to build this technology are themselves among those warning it could end us. In 2023, the chief executives of the three leading labs, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, all signed a single extraordinary sentence declaring that cutting the risk of extinction from AI should be “a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Altman has told the United States Congress that “if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.” Amodei has estimated, in interview after interview, something like a one-in-four chance that things turn out catastrophically, even as his company ships ever more powerful models. Ilya Sutskever, who co-founded OpenAI, left to start a new lab devoted solely to building the technology safely. And Jan Leike, who once led OpenAI’s effort to control superintelligence, quit in 2024 protesting that safety had “taken a backseat to shiny products.”