Lennard: AI CEOs' Doom Talk Distracts From Real Harms

In The Intercept, Natasha Lennard argues that when Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk warn that AI could wipe out humanity, the apocalyptic framing serves the same executives building the systems.

The column leans on 'Why We Fear AI,' a 2025 book by cognitive scientist Hagen Blix and machine learning researcher Ingeborg Glimmer. 'If the stakes are as high as the very survival of humanity,' they write, 'then concerns about the effects that really existing artificial intelligence technology has right now… are easily brushed aside.' Lennard's list of those effects: AI-generated kill lists in Gaza, revenge porn tools, racist predictive-policing databases, deepfakes, content taken from artists, classroom bans, and the water and power draw of AI data centers.

She quotes Eric Schmidt, via a New York Times report, saying AI has 'too much potential, to let concerns about climate change get in the way.' The extinction framing itself is not new: in 2023, hundreds of researchers and executives signed an open letter declaring that 'mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.'

Two of the AI experts we track had already shared the piece by publication day. Lennard's point is not that AI cannot harm; it is that the people warning loudest of catastrophe are the same ones with the most to gain from framing the debate on their terms.