Anthropic Co-Founder Warns There Is 'Non-Zero Chance' AI Could Kill Everyone On Planet: "Risk Hasn't Gone Away"

Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, has claimed that many people are still in denial about AI's progress. During a lecture at the University of Oxford on Wednesday (May 20), Clark compared the failure to prepare for AI to the failure to prepare for pandemics such as COVID-19, warning that the technology would "soon be more capable than all of us collectively".

“If we stand by and let synthetic intelligence multiply, then we'll eventually be forced into reactivity," Clark was quoted as saying by The Guardian.

Clark also said there remained plausible scenarios in which the technology had “a non-zero chance of killing everyone on the planet” and that it was “important to clearly state that that risk hasn't gone away”.

The Anthropic boss told the students that it would be better for all of humanity if we could slow down the development of the technology "to give ourselves more time as a species". However, he added that it would not happen as a variety of actors and countries were locked in competition to gain the advantage over each other. 

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The Future Of AI

Clark is not the only one to have warned about the potential impact of AI. Earlier this year, his business partner, Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, warned about the rapid advancement of AI, arguing that powerful AI systems could pose profound risks to societies and economies.

In a long, reflective essay titled 'The Adolescence of Technology', Amodei described a future in which AI could soon outperform the brightest human minds across disciplines and act with a degree of autonomy that current institutions are ill-prepared to manage. He cautioned that civilisation is "considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than in 2023," urging policymakers, technologists and the public to confront these challenges urgently.

Similarly, Geoffrey Hinton, widely regarded by many as the 'Godfather of AI', has warned that humanity was reaching a stage where the machines could outsmart humans and resist shutdown if not controlled.

"It makes me very sad that I put my life into developing this stuff and that it's now extremely dangerous and people aren't taking the dangers seriously enough," Hinton said. "We've never been in this situation before of being able to produce things more intelligent than ourselves.

The Nobel laureate highlighted that the biggest mistake that humanity could make now would not be investing in research on how humans can coexist with the intelligent AI systems they have been creating.

"If we create them so they don't care about us, they will probably wipe us out," Hinton added.