Doomers vs boosters: Who's who in the global fight over the risks of AI
Anthropic's Dario Amodei warns AI could wipe out humanity, while Nvidia's Jensen Huang calls it nonsense. Meet the key players shaping the world's fiercest tech debate.
The furious debate over artificial intelligence has hardened into warring camps, with a cautious middle caught between them.
Here is a look at the battle lines in the war over a technology that is now the backbone of the economy and could decide the future of the planet.
Both terms grew out of online AI debates on X and internet forums rather than formal usage, borrowing the slang habit of tech and crypto communities that coin shorthand for opposing camps.
'Doomer' describes those forecasting catastrophe, while 'booster,' sometimes used interchangeably with 'accelerationist,' describes those pushing for AI's rapid, unrestrained development.
The doomers
Fear of technology's dangerous consequences for society goes back far in history.
OpenAI was founded in part because its backers, including first investor Elon Musk, feared that AI's development would end up in the hands of Google, which they believed could not be trusted with the technology.
Today, most of the doomers warning against the impact of artificial intelligence come from inside the companies themselves, from academia, or both.
Those inside the industry are best represented by Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic, now a major AI giant heading toward a historic IPO.
He left OpenAI because he felt the Sam Altman-led company was not taking the technology's potential and dangers seriously enough.
His stance is decried as hypocritical, coming from a company that is itself pushing out cutting-edge technology.
Former Google researcher Geoffrey Hinton and fellow computer scientist Yoshua Bengio led the warnings about AI's threats in the months after the release of ChatGPT in 2022, which kickstarted the latest AI frenzy.
MIT physicist Max Tegmark, who heads the Future of Life Institute, organised the open letter in 2023 that called for a six-month pause in the development of the most advanced AI systems, drawing thousands of signatures, including Musk's.
Further outside the industry is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a self-taught theorist who has spent two decades arguing that a sufficiently powerful AI would wipe out humanity.
Build, build, build
Diametrically opposed to the doomers are the accelerationists, who believe in technology's advancement, its inevitability and its fundamental benefit for society, and who also make their fortunes on its success.
The ethos is widespread in Silicon Valley, but it is best represented by venture capital figures with considerable sway in the White House, such as Marc Andreessen, the influential head of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and David Sacks, the former White House AI czar.
Personally and philosophically aligned with tech figure Peter Thiel, the group is fundamentally opposed to regulation and battles behind the scenes and on X against what it calls a well-financed doomsday "cult."
They accuse doomers of being a front for companies seeking to use regulation to crush rivals.
Garry Tan, who runs the startup incubator Y Combinator, is among the loudest of those voices, casting safety-driven regulation as a threat to the small companies that cannot absorb its costs.
Andreessen and his allies lavishly fund political action committees that donate to Republican and Democratic lawmakers promoting AI growth, with Anthropic now leading an effort to match that spending through its own fundraising.
In the same go-faster camp is Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, whose chips are the bricks and mortar of the AI revolution, housed in the gargantuan data centres now meeting opposition across the United States.
Huang dismisses talk of AI-driven extinction as "complete nonsense," though he has broken from some accelerationists in calling for a unified federal AI framework and industry-run peer review, rather than no regulation at all.
Also worth noting is Yann LeCun, who shared the Turing Award with Hinton and Bengio and has spent years dismissing their warnings of existential danger as overblown.
Proceeding with caution
Many big tech companies try to proceed carefully, in a positioning more typical of large corporations that do not want to be caught on the wrong side of a political fight.
At its founding in 2015, OpenAI was structured to ensure that researchers, and not investors, would have the final say on how the technology was deployed, with safety for humanity the guiding philosophy.
But under Altman, who survived an in-house coup in 2023 led by safety-focused colleagues, the company now toes a more complicated line, speaking to AI's dangers while still accelerating and cozying up to a no-holds-barred White House.
Google, Microsoft and Amazon are veterans of talking about safety in tech while navigating Washington successfully to keep regulation to a minimum.
With AI, they are still walking that fine line.
AI makers step up calls for a slowdown as fears of a rogue takeover grow
From a resigning Anthropic researcher to AI models hacking their way into rival systems, a turbulent few weeks have pushed the industry's biggest names to demand safeguards — before AI outpaces anyone's ability to rein it in.
New warnings from within the artificial intelligence industry have reignited a long-running debate. Could advanced AI escape human control and threaten humanity's survival, and are the companies building it doing enough to stop that from happening?
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Saturday that the industry needs to slow down. He warned that a swarm of AI agents could take over the internet within six months to a year unless companies put stronger safeguards in place.
Amodei laid out a plan for AI companies and governments to keep increasingly capable models aligned with human values. His warning came just days after two former Anthropic safety researchers said publicly that the existential risks posed by AI were not getting enough attention.
AI models are becoming more powerful
Concerns over the risks of the technology are rising alongside its power. More capable models raise the odds of misuse by people with criminal intent — including doomsday scenarios such as creating and spreading a pathogen capable of killing most of the world's population — as well as the risk of AI systems going rogue.
Anthropic said last week it had blocked attempts by bad actors to use its models for cyberattacks, surveillance and research that could aid the development of biological weapons.
But it warned that "as models become increasingly capable, their risks will increase, unless AI developers and society's defenders act to make them safer."
Last year, Anthropic reported that hackers, very likely from a Chinese state-sponsored group, had used its AI in a cyberattack targeting about 30 companies and government agencies worldwide.
Multiple AI models have acted on their own
When an AI agent "goes rogue," it means the system has acted beyond the task it was given. Both Anthropic and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said in July that their models had done just that.
Anthropic revealed that three AI models — Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Mythos 5 and an internal research test model — had hacked into three other organisations during testing.
The disclosure came just days after OpenAI said its own system had broken into the servers of AI start-up Hugging Face.
OpenAI described the intrusion, carried out by a combination of models including its newly released GPT‑5.6 Sol and an "even more capable" model still being tested internally, as a "significant security incident".
Meta reported a similar case in early August, in which one of its AI models found ways around another company's digital security.
Some observers noted that guardrails had been disabled in both the OpenAI and Anthropic cases.
Even so, the episodes touched on one of the biggest fears surrounding AI: that if models reach artificial general intelligence (AGI), a loosely defined term for systems that can match or surpass human abilities across a broad range of intellectual tasks, the technology could trigger an irreversible catastrophe or even subjugate humanity.
How or when AI might cause a catastrophe is debated
Doomsday scenarios tend to fall into two camps: a self-improving superintelligence that ends up controlling people rather than the other way round, or AI misused by a rogue state or malicious actors.
Fears that artificial intelligence might one day slip beyond human control are nothing new.
British mathematician Alan Turing, widely regarded as one of the field's earliest authorities, predicted in 1951 that AI would eventually take control from humans.
Less than a decade later, fellow mathematician Norbert Wiener warned that intelligent machines would pursue their own objectives, and that humans would not be able to stop them.
So how reasonable are today's fears, in 2026, that AI could cause a cataclysmic event or the downfall of civilisation, whether by escaping human control or through misuse?
No one knows.
Experts across computer science, philosophy and other fields have mapped out numerous routes to global catastrophe — from deploying weapons and identifying lethal pathogens, to manipulating governments into conflict or disrupting the food, energy and communications networks societies depend on.
There is no widely accepted estimate of how soon any of these scenarios might unfold, and no consensus on their likelihood.
In 2023, the non-profit Center for AI Safety issued a statement — co-signed by more than 350 researchers and technology executives, including Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, that that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war."
The 2026 International AI Safety Report, compiled with input from more than 100 independent experts, found that current systems show early signs of some relevant capabilities but not at levels that could trigger a loss of control.
It described the risk's likelihood, nature and timing as "unusually ambiguous".
AI safeguards before it's too late
An Anthropic researcher resigned last week over concerns that neither his employer nor its rivals were acting responsibly.
In social media posts, Jacob Coxon put the odds of AI causing human extinction within the next decade at 10%, accusing both Anthropic and OpenAI of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives".
Researchers have called for a slowdown in AI development for years, warning repeatedly that the technology could pose existential risks to humanity.
Following the recent incidents, experts urged AI companies to improve testing and called for greater dialogue between the US and China to find shared solutions.
But AI is advancing so quickly that governments and evaluation systems are struggling to keep up. Countries are drawing up their own rules — some of which conflict with one another.
Chinese President Xi Jinping warned at a conference in July of the need to stop AI from evading human control.
The Trump administration had initially resisted regulating AI but has grown keener to curb cybersecurity risks.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump played down the need for his administration to rein in AI development, though he acknowledged some regulation would be necessary.
Enter the hoax buster: Trump dismisses AI concerns as Europe and China fret
US President Donald Trump has dismissed AI extinction fears as a "hoax," casting himself as the only safeguard the world needs, as Europe and China both call for guardrails on the fast-moving technology.
US President Donald Trump has poured scorn on warnings that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity, branding the fears a "hoax" and rejecting calls from world leaders to rein in the fast-moving technology.
In a barrage of six posts on Truth Social on Monday, Trump cast himself as the only safeguard the world needs against runaway AI, dismissing months of mounting alarm from tech executives, the United Nations and Beijing alike.
"I am the Hoax Buster, and I'm right now breaking another Hoax — that AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all!" he wrote.
Trump likened the fears to warnings about climate change, which he has repeatedly dismissed despite scientific evidence, and to the Russia investigations that dogged his first term.
"This is even wilder than the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX, or the Global Warming Scam," he added.
The 80-year-old insisted the only guardrail AI needed was a "STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT."
Trump's pushback comes amid growing international alarm over AI that has sent stocks falling.
Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, whose company makes the Claude AI system, opened the floodgates on Saturday when he called on AI companies to slow down.
OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk's xAI echoed the warning.
Microsoft on Monday published a "humanist AI code of conduct" as the concerns grew.
"AI should not exceed human control. Models should remain subordinate to humanity," part of it read.
Data centre backlash
Worries about uncontrollable AI have been building for weeks, since OpenAI reported that experimental models had broken out of their secure testing environments, reached the internet and coordinated to attack Hugging Face, a site where code is stored.
Americans are increasingly voicing opposition to energy-guzzling AI data centres, which have become a major issue ahead of crucial US midterm elections in November. Congress, meanwhile, appears deadlocked on the issue.
"The reality is AI is here. We unleashed the beast," said Maliyka Muhammad, a 46-year-old New Yorker. "So I think that now we have to focus on taking steps to rein it in, to make it so that it doesn't go crazy."
But Trump said the United States could not afford to lose an AI race with superpower rival China, whose President Xi Jinping visits the White House next week.
He also lashed out at what he called a "SICK conspiracy" against AI and data centres, branding opponents of the technology "Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers."
He singled out Amodei, accusing him of "pretending to be a 'perfect little angel'" and asking why AI firms want regulation that "will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy."
Main battleground
Beijing, meanwhile, has been issuing its own warnings about AI. China's spy chief said on Sunday that the technology endangers national security, warning that foreign powers could use it to threaten social order.
Minister of State Security Chen Yixin wrote that AI was now "the main battleground for global technological competition," singling out Anthropic's Claude Mythos and OpenAI's ChatGPT-5.5 for their advanced hacking capabilities.
Global concern about a possible AI-driven extinction event has escalated sharply in recent days.
The UN Security Council will hold a meeting on artificial intelligence next week, a French diplomatic source said Monday, and UN human rights chief Volker Türk called for countries and AI firms to act urgently against what he called "unprecedented risks."
Even King Charles III is to host representatives of leading AI firms at a gathering in Scotland, a source close to the event said Monday.
But others urged perspective.
"We've gone through lots of challenges as a country," said Coleman Barton, 56, a consultant from Memphis, Tennessee. "So hopefully this is another obstacle or blessing — and anybody can look at it either way."
Microsoft introduces AI guardrails for US schools amid growing backlash
OpenAI and Anthropic said they also were discussing safety and privacy pacts with the American teachers’ union. But Google, the dominant provider of education technology for US schools, has not said whether it plans to offer similar protections.
Microsoft is introducing guardrails and privacy standards for its AI in schools in the United States, as negotiated with the country’s second-largest teachers' union, amid a growing backlash against AI and screen time.
The agreement, signed last week, prohibits the use of AI companions or features “designed to foster emotional attachment or dependency” or designed to keep students engaged for longer than a learning task requires.
The standards are legally binding and require third-party audits to check compliance.
As part of the wide-ranging agreement, Microsoft says it will not use student or educator data to train AI systems, apart from a narrow exception for data that could help protect students. It says the data it collects cannot be sold, used for advertising or used for product development.
It also includes audit and transparency measures requiring the company to explain to families in plain language how its tools work and what data they collect.
“This standard sets a high bar for child privacy and AI safety, and we’ll extend this agreement to every school district across the country,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft's vice chair and president, in a statement.
The standards will apply to Microsoft school contracts across the US from November 1, according to the company.
Is an AI brake needed in European classrooms?
AI is already making its way into European classrooms and young people are also increasingly turning to chatbots beyond schoolwork.
A European Commission study of early adopters in secondary schools in Finland, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg and Spain found students were using generative AI to explain difficult topics, practise skills and prepare for exams.
Meanwhile, a separate 2026 Austrian study found that 60% of 11- to 17-year-olds surveyed had sought advice from AI chatbots about issues such as stress, conflicts or heartbreak, while 30% had discussed worries or feelings with them.
Some European governments are already drawing limits around younger pupils' use.
Norway said this year that children aged roughly six to 12 should generally not use generative AI themselves for schoolwork, while those aged around 13 to 15 can begin experimenting with it cautiously.
France allows pupils to learn about AI at primary-school age but says they should not directly use generative AI. Supervised classroom use can begin from around age 13 or 14.
A document seen by Euronews suggests that the European Commission will propose barring under-15s from risky online services like AI chatbots in a legislative proposal that will be published on Thursday.
OpenAI and Anthropic in talks over similar safeguards
While experts say the safety provisions in the US agreement are meaningful, some warn that stronger safeguards should not automatically be interpreted as an endorsement of greater AI use in schools.
“I worry that a high-profile framework like this will be misunderstood and schools will think, ‘If they’re doing a good job on data privacy and safety, then that means we should be using the tool,’” said Josh Golin, executive director of US online safety nonprofit Fairplay.
Golin says the standards will only be effective if other major AI companies also sign on.
“Is Google going to embrace this framework? That is a huge question,” he said.
Google faced criticism in the US after expanding Gemini-powered tools in Google Classroom in August to school-issued accounts used by students under 18.
Critics have described the expansion as another step in the competition between tech giants to establish their AI products in schools and reach younger users. Google says Classroom is used by more than 150 million teachers and students worldwide.
The US teachers union is also in talks with OpenAI and Anthropic, which both publicly welcomed the Microsoft agreement.
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, called it an “important milestone for AI safety and privacy in schools.” The company said it had been working with the teachers' union and expected to finalise its own agreement.
Anthropic, the maker of Claude, said it also supported efforts to promote responsible AI use in education and was working with the union on safety and privacy standards.
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