And answering it in detail is giving tools to people who may want to do it.
"releasing a very transmittable and deadly respiratory virus with long incubation period" is just one of many ways.
All of the frontier AI companies have been racing to automate themselves, that is, where AI fully autonomously build the next generation of models. Whether this leads to recursive self improvement is a valid question, but a lot of folks think they are close.
The fear is that a misaligned AI will be building the next model with deliberately hidden motives, similar to some of the behaviors seen in the Hugging Face and related attacks. That is why there is such a big push for interpretability, and why it's highly concerning (a) chains of thought are getting harder to interpret in any case, and (b) companies will go more towards things like looping transformers and "neuralese" where thought processes are completely opaque (i.e. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/secret-technique-beh...)
So the belief is not so much that AI kills us all by 2036, but that instead AI is recursively improving by that time and all seems awesome and great so we put it into more systems that can affect the real world (as we've already begun to do, like literal lethal aerial drones). Things then all go along looking great until AI decides humans are a hindrance to its (hidden) goals.
Again, I think it's fine to argue against specific steps in that scenario, but putting out a blog post saying "this is overhyped bullshit" is not exactly making a cogent argument.
What he's asking for isn't possible in the form he's asking for it.
AI experts can't even agree on what AI is, what it's capable of and what the limits of its development are. If the experts can't even agree on what's happening "inside of" these LLMs, how can they give laypeople an assessment of the risk?
If you, at least for the sake of argument, accept the possibility that AI is a new form of intelligence that we don't fully understand, is it really a stretch to look at some of its capabilities and behaviors and discuss how they might have existential implications? And stopping short of extinction, shouldn't we discuss the ways that this technology could "end" civilization as we know it?
Also, the author wrote:
> AI executes on physical systems that have been engineered with human accountability and control. Intelligence does not exempt a system from the realities of the physical world!
For someone making a point about responsibility, this is ridiculously irresponsible. Any honest technologist knows that systems created by humans are not perfect and therefore cannot be assumed to be infinitely accountable to and controllable by humans.
Thanks to the digitization of almost everything, including infrastructure, there are a myriad number of scenarios well short of extinction in which a rogue AI could cause immense damage to property and life before humans are able to "shut it down".
The answer, if you are a responsible expert in the field, is to convey the range of possibilities and the uncertainty.
That might be too imprecise for the HN set but it's realistic for laypeople.
And none of the AI people talking about the risk are running into rooms full of people telling them Claude has gone mad and yelling at them to disconnect from the internet and turn off their devices immediately.
> For someone making a point about responsibility, this is ridiculously irresponsible.
It's not just irresponsible, it's false. Russia killed 3 Ukrainian civilians with a drone where the targeting was completely autonomous by AI running on an Nvidia chip: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/world/europe/russia-drone.... The Pentagon tried to completely blacklist Anthropic because Anthropic refused to allow autonomous kills without a human in the loop. If you can't see how lots of military leaders want to put more lethal control into AI at this point I think you have to be willfully blind.
1. https://www.aifutures.org/ outlines a number of specific scenarios, and importantly details their methodology for each.
2. Independent researchers in the Hugging Face incident outlined how previously predicted misalignment scenarios actually played out, and outlined how slightly more advanced AI, or slightly more misaligned, or with more access to critical infrastructure, could cause immense harm: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-atta...
3. Technical leaders at OpenAI (specifically their chief scientist) outlined the problems they gave with controlling models now: https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/
None of the specific arguments in these or many other detailed explanations of how an AI takeover could occur were even acknowledged.
Killing even 10% of humanity should be unacceptable, can't believe this argument is even happening