Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei seen after a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron during the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Feb. 19, 2026.
Photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
In the last
week, a raft of top tech executives — including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — joined a chorus of doomsaying voices from Silicon Valley urging a
slowdown
in artificial intelligence development.
The executives feared, they said, that the tools would become too powerful too soon and pose an existential risk to humanity.
Why would three multibillionaire tech CEOs all come together to agree that the technologies their companies are developing might be too dangerous?
Do the overlords of Silicon Valley really think frontier AI models are likely to “kill all humans,” as one senior employee at Anthropic
warned
last week? Is this just
another example of
hype
propagated to
draw in more investment
?
Talk of existential risk is a highly convenient way to not address the already known harms produced by AI.
The beneficiaries of the AI gold rush and the beneficiaries of investment in AI safety are, after all, likely to be the very same people, even if AI stocks have
fallen
in recent days amid the latest doom cycle.
We could waste a lot of time speculating about the apocalyptic or cynical worldviews of tech billionaires. Regardless of what these CEOs and their employees actually believe, however, one thing is clear: Talk of existential risk is a highly convenient way to not address the already known harms produced by AI technologies overseen by fascist billionaires like Musk and
Palantir
CEO Alex Karp.
It’s a suspicious time for Silicon Valley leaders to again offer up millenarian narratives about existential risks beyond our comprehension. The CEOs’ warnings, after all, came at the very moment a cross-political consensus is growing against the proliferation of actually existing harms of AI and its infrastructur
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