![\"Anthropic](\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-2261854833.jpg?fit=7677%2C5118\")
In the last<\/span> week, a raft of top tech executives \u2014 including OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman, Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei, and SpaceX\u2019s Elon Musk \u2014 joined a chorus of doomsaying voices from Silicon Valley urging a slowdown<\/a> in artificial intelligence development.<\/p>\n The executives feared, they said, that the tools would become too powerful too soon and pose an existential risk to humanity.<\/p>\n Why would three multibillionaire tech CEOs all come together to agree that the technologies their companies are developing might be too dangerous?<\/p>\n Do the overlords of Silicon Valley really think frontier AI models are likely to \u201ckill all humans,\u201d as one senior employee at Anthropic warned<\/a> last week? Is this just another example of <\/a>hype<\/a> propagated to draw in more investment<\/a>?<\/p>\n Talk of existential risk is a highly convenient way to not address the already known harms produced by AI.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The beneficiaries of the AI gold rush and the beneficiaries of investment in AI safety are, after all, likely to be the very same people, even if AI stocks have fallen<\/a> in recent days amid the latest doom cycle.<\/p>\n We could waste a lot of time speculating about the apocalyptic or cynical worldviews of tech billionaires. Regardless of what these CEOs and their employees actually believe, however, one thing is clear: Talk of existential risk is a highly convenient way to not address the already known harms produced by AI technologies overseen by fascist billionaires like Musk and Palantir<\/a> CEO Alex Karp.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a suspicious time for Silicon Valley leaders to again offer up millenarian narratives about existential risks beyond our comprehension. The CEOs\u2019 warnings, after all, came at the very moment a cross-political consensus is growing against the proliferation of actually existing harms of AI and its infrastructure. Consider, for example, mass opposition<\/a> to data centers<\/a> and classroom AI bans<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Silicon Valley talk about existential risk is hardly new<\/a>. In 2023, hundreds of tech researchers, CEOs of the major AI companies, investors, and academics signed<\/a> an open letter on AI risk just one sentence long: \u201cMitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.\u201d<\/p>\n Pitiful international commitments to preventing future pandemics and nuclear wars are hardly a reassuring baseline, but the sentiment of the open letter played into a now typical AI story, thick with theological overtones: A threshold is supposedly approaching, which could lead to the total destruction of life on Earth \u2014 or our salvation.<\/p>\n That threshold, according to the figureheads of technocapital, is the birth of AGI: \u201cartificial general intelligence<\/a>,\u201d or systems of equal or superior intelligence to humans. From that point, these stories go, mighty super intelligent machines would emerge through recursive cycles of AI self-improvement.<\/p>\n The destruction wrought by these AI systems could be total, so we are told, if they are not \u201caligned\u201d with human interests. According to one particularly deranged thought experiment, our future robot overlords could turn everything on Earth into paperclips<\/a>.<\/p>\n Alternatively, the utopian storyline goes, the magic of AI \u2014 and it is described with no more concreteness than gestures to magic \u2014 will solve every worldly problem and more, from climate devastation, to poverty, to illness, to mortality itself.<\/p>\n Consider how tech multibillionaires Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt have brushed off the issue of AI processing\u2019s already ruinous, gargantuan consumption of energy and water use. The New York Times reported<\/a> that Schmidt believes AI has \u201ctoo much potential, to let concerns about climate change get in the way.\u201d<\/p>\n Advanced AI will bring such growth, such prosperity, such environment-saving technology, such holy deliverance, they say, that only a small-minded technophobe could want to hold back the learning machines in their dizzying progress.<\/p>\n How will super AI do this? I can\u2019t tell you. Crucially, neither can the billionaires and technologists bringing this alleged magic \u2014 or terror \u2014 to the world. Nor can those directing unprecedented, economy-redefining amounts of capital and energy toward data centers and AI research articulate artificial intelligence\u2019s path to redemption.<\/p>\n The whole point is that those of us at the bottom of the food chain \u2014 the consumers, or maybe all of humanity \u2014 cannot possibly understand the forces at work here.<\/p>\n We should be skeptical of these propagandistic narratives. This is not to say that the AI industries are not world-changing. AI can already do extraordinary things, many far beyond human capacities; these technologies have already had profound effects on the world of work, on global infrastructure, on the applications of state violence, on the vast flows of capital and energy.<\/p>\n AI isn\u2019t, after all, one thing: It\u2019s collection of methods based in what\u2019s known as machine learning, which is basically algorithms using statistics to find patterns in massive amounts of data, including in extraordinarily complex ways.<\/p>\n AI products and services<\/a> abound, from text and image generative content<\/a> to recommendation engines, like those used by Spotify and Netflix; fraud detection systems; and navigation systems such as Google Maps.<\/p>\n Yes, we\u2019re swimming in AI slop, enshittified search engines, stolen content, deepfakes, embarrassing mistakes, and hallucinations. But there are also scientists using machine learning to revolutionize<\/a> the detection and treatment of Alzheimer\u2019s disease.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, AI systems are used to generate \u2014 and justify \u2014 kill lists<\/a> in a genocide, or generate revenge porn, or populate predictive-policing databases<\/a> along racist lines.<\/p>\n\n
Deliverance or Destruction<\/h2>\n