US AI Fears Explainer
FILE - Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks during a meeting in Shanghai, July 17, 2026.
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New warnings from the artificial-intelligence industry have revived debate over whether advanced AI models could escape human control and threaten humanity. The CEO of Anthropic suggests the industry should slow down developing the technology and put more safeguards in place. Worries that an artificial intelligence might exceed human abilities or be misused by unscrupulous people aren't new. Experts have envisioned numerous routes by which a future AI system might cause a global catastrophe. They range from deploying weapons and engineering a pandemic to disrupting food, energy and communications networks. But there's no widely accepted estimate for how soon any of these scenarios might happen and no consensus on their likelihood.
