Al Gore backs AI safety alarms over data-center emissions

"If you look at the emissions of all of the AI data centers put together, it's only a fraction of the emissions from uncovered landfills in the world," Al Gore told TechCrunch in an interview published this week. Gore said what should worry the public more is what AI leaders are themselves warning about.

He takes slow-down calls from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei seriously, and views similar warnings from Sam Altman and Elon Musk as genuine. "I do think that Dario Amodei is very sincere, and I think that Sam Altman and Elon Musk were sincere," he told the outlet. He pointed to recent reports of "models escaping confinement, collaborating secretly, covering their tracks, engaging in deceptive behavior" as the kind of signal he thinks the public should weigh.

On the data-center build-out itself, Gore described the situation as a "cause for deep concern, but not panic." He is more troubled by hyperscalers turning to methane turbines, which he said "locks in decades more of fossil fuel generation" independent of AI load. He compared the scale of AI power demand to air conditioning, which the International Energy Agency projects will roughly triple by 2050.

Gore also pushed back on the environmental framing of the growing data-center opposition in the U.S. The protests, he argued, are "being driven by the underlying concerns about job losses and some of the other threats that experts inside OpenAI and inside Anthropic have been trying to alert the public to."

He closed on the clean-energy numbers he has been circulating: 86% of new global electricity capacity last year came from renewables, 91% in the U.S., and clean-energy investment now runs at roughly twice fossil-fuel investment. He also cited work by economist Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics projecting that AI applied to efficiency and waste reduction could cut global emissions by 6% to 9% per year starting next decade.