Not everyone thinks AI will kill us all

By Hadas Gold, Clare Duffy, CNN

(CNN) — When AI company Hugging Face was hacked by a swarm of rogue OpenAI agents who had escaped their testing environment, the company’s CEO had many things to say.

He called it an unprecedented event – “day one for cybersecurity in the age of agents.”

But here’s one thing he didn’t say: The hack is not a sign AI is going to be able to eventually wipe out humanity.

Clement Delangue doesn’t buy into the doomer hype that’s gone viral in recent weeks, even as the victim of likely the most sophisticated AI agent-powered attack (that we know of). He scoffed at former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, when he posted on X that the people building AI are “gambling with our lives” because they believe it “will kill us all.”

“Asking (Coxon) about AI extinction risk is like asking your AC guy about climate change,” Delangue posted on X. “Not saying it’s necessarily uninteresting or wrong per se but let’s keep things in perspective and hear from the full range of expertise across the ecosystem!”

It’s easy to get the impression that everyone in AI is worried about it causing human extinction. But that’s not the case. There are plenty of scientists, industry researchers, and executives who believe the risks are overblown, and the technology is the way toward a new golden age.

AI’s biggest backer isn’t scared

Yes, there are major safety concerns surrounding AI, these anti-doomer AI scientists and other industry veterans say. But they maintain that AI is not going to wipe out humanity in the next few years, as some have predicted.

Each has their own reasoning – some say any action AI would take that could wipe out humanity would need heavy involvement from human accomplices. Then there’s those who say AI at the end of the day is a computer program that can be engineered, and others who say that engineers are getting better and better at keeping AI from going rogue.

Still others worry that by raising alarms about a hypothetical extinction risk, some may be seeking to direct policymaking in a way that could benefit some companies over others.

One of the loudest voices has been Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose company not only dominates the AI chips industry, but also has stakes in many other major AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic. He told CBS News on Sunday that there is a “0% chance” AI will cause the end of humanity by 2030.

“Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible,” Huang added.

Huang has pushed back against the so-called “doomers” for years. He did not sign a 2023 Center for AI Safety one-sentence statement that stated: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” (The CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind all signed the statement).

In 2023, he told the New Yorker he has never worried about AI technology.

His comments have only grown more forceful since then. In July, he told Axios that the idea that AI is going to be the end of humanity as “complete nonsense.”

Huang also rejected calls from other AI leaders for greater AI regulation, saying it’s up to the companies to pace themselves. Recent incidents of AI agents going rogue, taking unsanctioned actions and hacking into other companies is just an issue of a product not being ready to be released, he said.

“That’s engineering, good old-fashioned engineering,” he told reporters at an AI summit hosted by Britain’s King Charles III last week.

“This is no different than, you know, an omelet’s not ready to be released, or a car is not ready to be released, an airplane engine’s not ready to be released. You should properly test it.”

Then there’s Turing Award-winning computer scientist Yann LeCun, considered by many in the industry to be one of the “godfathers of AI” and the former chief AI scientist at Meta. LeCun responded bluntly to a user who claimed AI “will get us all killed in three years”:

“No, Not a chance in hell,” he said. “AI folks who live in the discrete world of bits and tokens don’t always understand how incredibly messy the real world is,” he added.

LeCun has compared the panicked responses to recent AI incidents to blaming the entire plumbing industry for one bad plumber’s mistake, LeCun said.

Risks, but not existential ones

Not everyone dismisses the risk quite so bluntly, though. Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere, a leader in the open-weight AI model space, told CNN in a recent interview that the “doomer” talk is “misleading and scary.” Gomez lamented that the public may be getting “this skewed perspective” that the entire industry says AI poses an immediate existential risk to humans, “which is fundamentally not true,” he said.

Where Huang and LeCun wave the extinction scenario away almost entirely, Gomez draws a more specific line: He says there are real risks, just not the ones getting the most attention right now. The “most significant national security threat” posed by AI is cyberattacks, Gomez said, especially if such powerful tools fall into the wrong hands, or are being utilized by nation states for offensive operations.

Today, “you just need a data center, and overnight you have like a country’s population of the world’s best hackers at your disposal.”

As for misalignment — the fear that AI agents could go rogue on their own — Gomez said that’s “a concern,” but one he considers far more manageable than the cyber threat. He said the industry is “getting quite good at measuring it, getting quite good at detecting it.”

Rumman Chowdhury, US science envoy for AI under former President Joe Biden, takes the skepticism a step further, questioning not just the odds of an AI-driven extinction event but the mechanics of how one would even happen. While AI could be used to help kill humans, she argues, it would need human involvement to set it off.

“And then what? It uses the machines to actually make a physical virus, and then it, what, calls FedEx?” Chowdhury, now CEO of the safety firm Human Intelligence PBC, told CNN in an interview, referring to the often-referenced warning of AI creating a killer virus.

“Like, what is this mechanism?”

Chowdhury said she believes that researchers like Coxon are being honest that they think AI poses an existential risk. “But are his beliefs reality? No, his beliefs are not,” she said.

For Chowdhury, the sincerity of that belief is almost beside the point. What worries her is that such existential fears could distract from present harms the technology is already causing, such as AI deepfakes, mental health challenges and the potential for job loss.

Then there’s the loudest voice dismissing these concerns, which is also one of the most powerful: President Donald Trump, who has thus far defied calls for the US government to get more involved in setting standards or regulating the industry and called the recent alarm over AI “a hoax.”

“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!” he wrote earlier this month.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.