Exploring Prosperity- Challenging Pessimism in the US
Sep 17, 2026 · 8 min · 7 segments
Last week, Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment science at Anthropic, said he believes artificial intelligence has a greater than 10 percent chance of killing every human within the next decade. His…
Bob DeweyHost
What would it take for AI to kill literally every human? A catastrophe would have to reach across the world, defeat attempts to contain it, and leave no surviving population.
Conceivable routes include a biological disaster, nuclear war, or a prolonged collapse of the systems essential to survival.
AI might contribute through the actions of a person using it for harm or through a future system acting beyond human control.
E6 International AI Safety Report, chaired by Yoshua Bengio and written by an international group of experts, finds that safeguards are improving but remain imperfect.
Providers can also monitor for misuse, giving a determined actor reason to seek another way to use AI.
Open weight models raise a deeper concern because people can download and run them privately.
Someone can modify a model, remove its safeguards, and use it beyond a provider's monitoring.
Even then, AI advice does not give someone the materials for a biological weapon or control over nuclear weapons.
The question is how much the technology lowers the remaining barriers for a determined actor and whether an attack could spread so far that no one survived it.
The future AI may pursue goals its creators did not intend, conceal what it is doing, and resist attempts to stop it.
It would also need to carry out plans over time and gain access to resources through which it could cause harm.
The International AI Safety Report says current systems show early signs of some relevant abilities but cannot yet combine them at the level required to escape human control.
What would it take for AI to kill literally every human? A catastrophe would have to reach across the world, defeat attempts to contain it, and leave no surviving population.
Conceivable routes include a biological disaster, nuclear war, or a prolonged collapse of the systems essential to survival.
AI might contribute through the actions of a person using it for harm or through a future system acting beyond human control.
E6 International AI Safety Report, chaired by Yoshua Bengio and written by an international group of experts, finds that safeguards are improving but remain imperfect.
Providers can also monitor for misuse, giving a determined actor reason to seek another way to use AI.
Open weight models raise a deeper concern because people can download and run them privately.
Someone can modify a model, remove its safeguards, and use it beyond a provider's monitoring.
Even then, AI advice does not give someone the materials for a biological weapon or control over nuclear weapons.
The question is how much the technology lowers the remaining barriers for a determined actor and whether an attack could spread so far that no one survived it.
The future AI may pursue goals its creators did not intend, conceal what it is doing, and resist attempts to stop it.
It would also need to carry out plans over time and gain access to resources through which it could cause harm.
The International AI Safety Report says current systems show early signs of some relevant abilities but cannot yet combine them at the level required to escape human control.
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