How, Exactly, Could A.I. Kill Us?

How, Exactly, Could A.I. Kill Us? Employees of A.I. companies are increasingly sounding the alarm. When Jacob Coxon, a mathematician and software engineer, resigned from his research job at Anthropic last week, he warned, "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." This would be a remarkable statement were it not for the fact that artificial-intelligence leaders have long been saying precisely this. Dario Amodei, then a research scientist at OpenAI, raised the concern that a superintelligence "could destroy humanity," adding, "I can't see any reason and principle why that couldn't happen." Earlier, in 2015, Sam Altman, just before he co-founded OpenAI, said, "I think A.I. will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies created with serious machine learning." Elon Musk, in 2014: "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that." Perhaps the only thing that's changed between then and now is that the rest of the world is finally paying attention. In recent weeks, the same technology that, a couple of years ago, couldn't count the number of "R"s in the word "strawberry"--and, a couple of days ago, insisted to me that Dolly Parton is still alive--has been used to solve the Navier-Stokes problem, which has been stumping mathematicians for nearly a century, and has also demonstrated its ability to go rogue in a series of disturbing hacking incidents. Last week, Anthropic also published a report detailing various ways in which bad actors have attempted to use the company's A.I. models, including one especially troubling case of a scientist using Claude to study a virus at a military research institute--work that could yield a vaccine, a biological weapon, or both. A few days later, Amodei published a letter calling for an industry-wide slowdown and more government regulation, to which President Donald Trump responded, on Truth Social, "The only control or'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!" I recently spoke on The Political Scene podcast with my colleague Joshua Rothman, a staff writer who has been covering A.I. for years, about whether we're all doomed, and what it would even look like for A.I. to destroy humanity. Can A.I. leaders save us from their own creation, and how can the government coöperate in order to do so? And is A.I.'s capacity to do good--its potential to mitigate climate change or innovate medical treatments--hopelessly intertwined with its capacity to do bad? Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. A lot of people in the world of artificial intelligence are talking about their P(doom) number, which is the probability that artificial intelligence will lead to an absolutely catastrophic situation--possibly, or probably, killing us all.