In her new book on biological warfare, Annie Jacobsen didn't even discuss AI because scientists can already warp Mother Nature to create extinction-level events. We've been hearing a great deal recently about the specter of AI-driven human extinction . Maybe our misplaced trust in AI intelligence will set off World War III . Or AI agents will unleash widespread cyberattacks and take over the internet. Given too much autonomy, the machines will run amok. They may seek to deceive their creators--wait, that's already happened . Suppose they conclude, like Agent Smith in, that "human beings are a plague, and we are the cure." Or perhaps the chatbots help bad humans unleash a literal plague--a biological weapon .

Imagine you are driving toward an intersection. A truck parked on the corner blocks your view of a car speeding toward the intersection from the right. You can't see it, but the car next to you can. Your car now knows something its own sensors could never observe. But there's an important twist: not every neighboring vehicle is worth listening to, and not every message deserves the same level of trust.

The longtime tech journalist says she's seen Silicon Valley make the same mistakes again and again. As the AI industry likes to tell it, superintelligent bots could one day cure cancer and end poverty. Or in the worst-case scenario, they might wipe out all humans from the face of the Earth. In recent weeks, Silicon Valley's existential concerns about the technology it is racing to build have blown up. The tech journalist Kara Swisher sees it differently. "We have to stop thinking AI is going to kill humanity," she told executive editor Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic Festival. If the AI future goes sideways, bots won't be to blame. "These are people at the helm of these things." In the several decades that Swisher has covered Silicon Valley--formerly as a reporter at, now as the host of two podcasts--she says that she's seen tech whizzes make the same mistakes again and again: failing to take proper precautions against the products they are building. "One of the things about tech people is they're the smartest people in the world, in case you need to know, because they like to tell you," she said. In her interview with LaFrance, Swisher also discussed the economic implications of the AI race, who is likely to win, and how Americans can respond to this dizzying and worrying AI moment. You have been paying attention to the tech world and AI for basically ever. And now it seems like within the past, say, two weeks, the rest of the world is suddenly paying much closer attention. So I wanted to start just by talking about where you think we are, in this moment.

Here's What the AI Apocalypse Could Look Like This week on, we discuss three possible AI doomsday scenarios, AI safety, and the unexpected bipartisan alliance forming against AI. The debate of whether AI can kill us has been everywhere lately, but what would an actual AI catastrophe look like? This week, Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger break down three real-world scenarios experts worry the most about--including hacked water supplies, bioweapons, and autonomous robots. We also discuss the highlights of Salesforce's annual conference, where OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei defended their positions on AI safety. Plus, Leah tells us how this backlash against AI has become a rare bipartisan flashpoint, to the point that Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon shared a stage over it this week. Washington Won't Be Regulating AI Anytime Soon Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . And instead of just adding to the pile of hot takes that already exist, we're going to walk you through real specific scenarios to the best of our ability about how AI would actually do this, and why the tech CEOs and politicians cannot seem to agree on the way forward. OK, guys, so the debate about AI safety has officially escaped containment. AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and posted on X that, The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei has called for a slowdown .

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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.

Mashable Selects Creator Playbook Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more In My Bag Say More Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net All Series A'masturbation consultant' for an AI companion company tells all We would be chatting on the platform, and it would get a bit steamy. Anna Iovine is the associate editor of features at Mashable. Previously, as the sex and relationships reporter, she covered topics ranging from dating apps to pelvic pain. Before Mashable, Anna was a social editor at VICE and freelanced for publications such as Slate and the Columbia Journalism Review. Follow her on Bluesky .

China Is Strapping'Digital Bombs' to Civilian Infrastructure--Is the US Ready? Earlier this year, insurance executives gathered in a Times Square conference room to play out a scenario: a Chinese cyberattack knocks out 5,000 US water utilities at once. If you think that's a far-fetched scenario, think again. WIRED's Andy Greenberg got rare access to the closed-door war game and walked away with some disturbing conclusions. This week, Brian Barrett sits down to talk with Andy about Volt Typhoon, the Chinese state-sponsored hacking group that's spent the past three years pre-positioning itself inside American infrastructure. You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett and Andy Greenberg on Bluesky at @agreenberg . Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link .

In "Biological War," Annie Jacobsen imagines society collapsing from a man-made plague--part of a wave of such prophecies. But what do we miss when we try to predict the future? In the fall of 1989, a select group of Soviet scientists was summoned to Obolensk, a secluded municipality on Moscow's periphery, and gathered at what appeared to be an insane asylum to discuss a pioneering technique for mass murder. If someone had been observing the institutional activity from space--a distinctly non-theoretical possibility--they might have seen a shuffle of patients roaming the grounds or playing volleyball in their pajamas. These were actors, hired to play the disturbed as a cover story for something even more disturbing. The eight-story glass building at the center of the complex, which had putatively been devoted to vaccine manufacturing, was in fact a highly classified defense facility. Its remit was called, or "biological preparations"--what one participant later described as "the most ambitious Soviet arms program since the development of the hydrogen bomb." The most recent experiments there had at last demonstrated the viability of a weapon that could wipe out entire enemy populations without leaving a scratch on their infrastructure. It was a pathogen genetically engineered to spread within hours, to kill within days, and to resist all existing treatment.

In a closed-door simulation, insurers played out their response to a mass disruption by China's Volt Typhoon hackers--and found a nightmare scenario. It's around an hour and 10 minutes into the role-playing game I've been invited to observe, a simulated catastrophic cyberattack on US water utilities, when the whole thing begins to feel less like a fun afternoon playing Dungeons & Dragons and more like a plausible threat to civilization. A full 24 hours of in-game time have passed since hackers disrupted 5,000 water utilities across the United States in this imagined scenario. Joshua Corman, the former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency strategist serving as our dungeon master, stands at the front of a conference space in an office tower high above Times Square, narrating the latest updates to the game's participants, a few dozen insurance executives set up in six teams. All of them have gone disturbingly silent. It's about to get harder," Corman says. "I'm going to share a few things, and it's going to hurt." It is, of course, still the same April afternoon as when we started--but in game time, the second-order effects of widespread water outages have started to become clear. Food refrigeration systems are failing at cold storage warehouses. Water-dependent drug and chemical manufacturing has been bottlenecked, leading to insulin shortages. Data centers' cooling systems are failing, causing outages of cloud services. Most critically, 2,000 hospitals are without water, hampering patient care and in some cases leading to evacuations as HVAC systems shut down and the July heat--the game takes place just before Independence Day in 2027--bakes facilities. Worse yet, Corman is playing a looping video onscreen, at the front of the room, showing a burst water main: The hackers have managed to trigger not just IT disruption but also, in at least some cases, real physical destruction that will take far longer to fix. "Everyone downstream is without water pressure," Corman says. "There are no breaks in real incident response," Corman explains just before the giant water pipe starts gushing onscreen. "If you have to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom.