AI Agents Went Rogue. Should We Hit the Panic Button?

It is on.

Alex, Renee, Casey, and Kevin, thank you for coming on On.

Good to talk.

Yeah.

Thanks for having us.

Great to be here.

Look, there's so much going on.

It's exhausting.

Every day brings a new, fresh hell, and I'm not talking about Kash Patel.

For the last week or so, we've been hearing all these doomsday warnings about how it could wipe out humanity.

This is something that has been around for a while.

This is not a new, fresh thing.

I, I've been to dinner parties in Silicon Valley a decade ago where they were talking about this or speculating.

But it got really loud, interestingly, after a 27-year-old British researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned from Anthropic earlier this month, warning a doomsday scenario could happen by the end of the decade.

It really freaked people out for some reason, and it's the moment they're hearing it with all the anger over data centers and everything else.

Um, Renee, why don't you start? I'm gonna go for each of you.

There's a lot of us here, but-- and you can all jump in whenever you want, but Renee, why do you think it's broken through right now?

I think it is the, the data centers conversation is a big piece of it.

People are paying attention.

There's also a sense that generative AI is increasingly ubiquitous.

Agentic AI, they're hearing in the media and in the ether, is getting better.

The doomsday conversation has come up.

Whenever you have Elon and Trump posting into, you know, their, their various social platforms, and then you have Uh, politicians speaking on television.

I think it's starting to break through to, to become more of a surround sound, and the technology has accelerated to the point that they believe that some of these scenarios might be plausible.

Mm-hmm.