Hot take: safety rhetoric blurred cheap AI risk with extinction risk, fueling anti-AI sentiment
Dr_Atoosa · x · 2026-09-11
A sharp industry hot take tracing how the two labs drifted: OpenAI was founded because Sam and co thought Google couldn't be trusted with AGI; Anthropic split off as the "responsible" safety-focused alternative — which then also became "we're building the best AI," with claims of moral superiority and debates over functional consciousness and AI welfare. The two companies founded to slow Google down are now racing each other.
The deeper critique: after years of policing language, safety advocates still conflate cheap AI risk with extinction risk — "real risk" has become everyday shorthand for existential risk. The result: the author's non-AI friends (climate work, indie film) read "AI researchers say AI will make humanity extinct" headlines, lose their imagination of AI helping their goals, and turn anti-AI. Wrong fear is the worst type of fear; correcting the public imagination will be hard but necessary.
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