AI leaders have known about the extinction threat for decades | Judith Levine

What happened

According to The Guardian’s source item, AI leaders have known about the extinction threat for decades | Judith Levine, Scientists and entrepreneurs knew the dangers of AI a quarter-century ago. But animated by curiosity and profit, they went ahead anyway Over the past few weeks, many of us have struggled to concoct a mental image of brains in the cloud jumping their “sandbox”, sneaking onto the internet, recruiting “swarms” of other “agents” to cheat on a test, and, after discussing the ethics of the act, hacking into a wiki platform with the weird name Hugging Face. We knew that artificial intelligence was devouring our jobs, degrading our kids’ education, and deepfaking our politics; that datacenters were sucking up our water and electricity and sending us the bills. But until 8 September, when the Anthropic computer scientist Jacob Coxon posted his existential terror on Twitter/X, few of us suspected AI might be endangering our survival. Continue reading…

Context

The development sits in VINI’s Technology file for readers following technology, science, product policy, markets, infrastructure, and the public consequences of innovation. The original report is linked so readers can check the source account, follow later updates, and compare new coverage against the first published record. The source item is dated 2026-09-28T10:00:31+00:00.

What to watch

Open questions include whether primary sources issue follow-up statements, whether local or market impacts become clearer, and whether additional reporting changes the timeline or adds material context.

Source

Primary source: AI leaders have known about the extinction threat for decades | Judith Levine via The Guardian. VINI cites and links the source; it does not reproduce the publisher’s full article text without rights clearance.