Interviews with security researchers about AI's potential for large-scale destruction, as experts remain divided and global regulatory frameworks lag
we still have agency and an opportunity to act. https://www.nytimes.com/... Stephen Witt / @stephenwitt : I'm on the front page of the New York Times with an article about “The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World.” For this article, I interviewed the researchers who safeguard humanity from runaway AI. Spoiler alert: they're all like 23 years old. https://www.nytimes.com/... LinkedIn: Stuart Russell : Interesting article about AI risks in today's New York Times. A key quote: — “In the course of quantifying the risks of A.I., I was hoping that I would realize my fears were ridiculous. … Alec Crawford : Since ten people emailed this to me, I figured I would comment. The “title” is a bit of an overstatement, but the sentiment is correct. … Jaime Yassif, Ph.D. : It's interesting to see parts of the international AI safety community increasingly focused on catastrophic risks at the convergence of AI with bioengineering capabilities. … Yoshua Bengio : This op-ed published in The New York Times by Stephen Witt thoughtfully captures the urgency and complexity of navigating AI's risks … Bluesky: Tau-Mu Yi / @taumuyi : I view the #AI threat speculation as very important and very interesting basic research but we shouldn't be implementing basic research into laws just like we shouldn't be using basic research as medicines without clinical trials. [embedded post] Daniel Drepper / @danieldrepper : This is terrifying: “We have passed the threshold that nuclear fission passed in 1939. The point of disagreement is no longer whether A.I. could wipe us out. It could.” — For three years, Stephen Witt looked into the dangers of AI. For the NYT, he's giving a chilling look into his research. Don Curren / @dbcurren : “Specifically, he was worried that an #A.I. would engineer a lethal #pathogen — some sort of #super-coronavirus — to eliminate #humanity. 'I don't think there's anything close in terms of the scale of #danger,' he said.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o... #AI Yoshua Bengio / @yoshuabengio : This op-ed published in the @nytimes.com by Stephen Witt thoughtfully captures the urgency and complexity of navigating AI's risks, but also my sincere conviction that technical solutions are possible — we still have agency and an opportunity to act. — www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o... @thecursingpoet : When deception of this kind occurs, Dr. Hobbhahn . . can often pinpoint the exact moment the A.I. went rogue. . . sometimes the A.I. will even explicitly say things like “I will have to fudge the numbers, I will have to manipulate.” — Probability tells how this ends — www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o... Amir Attaran / @amirattaran : This article is a HOLY SHIT read, because AI now: — 1. Can lie well, — 2. Can reason and decide why to lie, — 3. Can bypass its own safety limits, and — 4. Can at least double its ability yearly with no end in sight. — You must read this. Jason Rosenbaum / @jasonrosenbaum : The nightmare A.I. prompt that keeps me awake at night: — “Make as many paperclips as you can.” — The A.I. then kills all of humanity because our bodies have atoms that could create paperclips. David Wood / @dw-2 : From an excellent article by Stephen Witt in the New York Times, that should make every reader pause and reflect www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o... [image] Threads: Fil Menczer / @fil.menczer : Terrifying: “The point of disagreement is no longer whether A.I. could wipe us out. It could... A destructive A.I., like a nuclear bomb, is now a concrete possibility. The question is whether anyone will be reckless enough to build one.” — https://www.nytimes.com/... Mastodon: David Steele / @DavidSteele@mastodon.social : “In the course of quantifying the risks of A.I., I was hoping that I would realize my fears were ridiculous. Instead, the opposite happened: The more I moved from apocalyptic hypotheticals to concrete real-world findings, the more concerned I became. All of the elements of Dr. Bengio's doomsday scenario were coming into existence.” … Forums: r/Longreads : The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World
Context & Ripple Effects
The story extends a long-running split between researchers who treat frontier AI as a potential existential hazard and those who caution against policy built around controlling hypothetical superintelligence. An earlier account of disagreement among leading AI researchers over catastrophic risk showed that this divide is not merely rhetorical.
It also follows warnings that competitive development can weaken alignment discipline, including an ex-OpenAI safety researcher's account of race-driven safety shortcuts. The new reporting centers the gap between such risk claims and available international governance.
First-order effects
- High-profile interviews give researchers' concerns about AI-enabled biological harm, deception and safety bypasses a clearer public-policy frame, while underscoring that experts do not agree on likelihood or urgency.
- AI labs and policymakers face greater pressure to explain what safeguards, evaluations and escalation paths they use for capabilities that could enable severe misuse.
Second-order effects
- The lack of expert consensus makes broad pauses or one-size-fits-all rules harder to sustain; debate is more likely to shift toward demonstrable controls for specific high-consequence capabilities.
- Security and biosecurity teams gain a stronger role in AI governance discussions, because the reported harms depend on model access, misuse testing and safeguards rather than abstract capability alone.
Third-order effects
- If frontier capabilities continue to advance faster than shared international rules, AI governance may increasingly resemble a security-and-access regime: responsibility shifts toward labs' operational controls and states' oversight of them.
- The enduring fault line will be whether governance can target concrete misuse pathways without committing policy to a single, contested forecast of superintelligent systems.
The trend: AI-risk debate is moving from generalized calls to slow development toward arguments over operational safeguards, model access and state oversight for frontier systems.