In early fall, I felt my anxiety rising from its usual baseline. Was it September’s back-to-school energy? The looming midterm elections? Nope, I realized with annoyance: It was AI—again. Only this time, instead of its purveyors warning of massive job displacement, they were foretelling mass extinction. Who needs jobs when we’re all dead?
Curiosity soon replaced my knee-jerk irritation. The summer of 2026 was a clear turning point in the AI narrative. Less than four years after ChatGPT launched, OpenAI software broke out of a supposedly safe test environment and hacked into a major open-source platform, Hugging Face. These bits of software—AI agents—were assigned human attributes: They had “gone rogue,” displayed “bad behavior,” “cheated.” Soon after, former and current Anthropic researchers suggested that advanced AI might kill us all in the next decade.
Is any of this real? On the one hand, from my desk as a Silicon Valley correspondent, I often hear that workers in the AI labs are stunned by the advancements they’re seeing. On the other, the end of humanity seems extremely far-fetched. Amid the hyperbolic discourse, whose views can we trust?
So WIRED set out to compile a guide to AI safety—a set of ideas that rewire our collective thinking around what safety really means and how it should work. I spoke with a panel of experts across disciplines, asking each of them: Is the world going to end? Once that was covered, I grilled them on the biggest risks they think we’re facing.
Almost no one, it turned out, was Pollyannish. Nearly everyone I spoke to expressed genuine concerns about the threat of cyber and biological attacks. One expert who studies the risks of AI in nuclear operations said she’s stunned by how quickly error-prone AI systems are being adopted in defense. AI-enabled attacks in these areas could be catastrophic, if not fully apocalyptic.
Most members of the panel were skeptical about any pause in development: They nearly all agreed that, with big AI companies so tightly cuffed to the trains of capitalism, a pause wouldn’t last long. “Democracy” and “governance” came up often—or anti-democracy, as more than one person suggested that AI’s current trajectory is tyrannical. Lawmakers have a big role to play, but many of my sources think governments will be too slow; one prominent technologist said it’s almost absurd to view the US courts as arbiters of global AI safety. Still, the famed computer scientist Yoshua Bengio urged the public to apply pressure to politicians, adding to me, “That’s your job too.”
So, what—or who—will keep us safe from AI? Looking to regain some faith in humanity, I called a theologian who often meets with the AI labs. If there’s even a slim chance that we’re losing control of the essential institutions that undergird society, he said, then we should focus on foiling that. But AI raises other questions too. What does it mean to be conscious? To create? To commune with other people? The answers are “entirely up for grabs,” he said. My anxiety’s still kicking around, but I took some comfort in knowing that corporations don’t get to call all the shots on the future. The bigger questions facing humanity are in all our hands.