What If We Got AI Right? by Eleanor Drage review – avoiding apocalypse; The Guardian, July 27, 2026

Sophie McBain, The Guardian ; What If We Got AI Right? by Eleanor Drage review – avoiding apocalypse

"The AI ethicist Eleanor Drage believes that to thrive alongside artificial intelligence, humans need to recognise AI’s “humanity”. She means that while we often speak of AI as though it were some mystical, formless thing, it is the product of hours of human labour, in silicon and quartz mines, microchip factories and data labelling centres. If citizens want to wrest power from the tech companies that are building AI, it helps to understand clearly what they are selling us. This also means seeing through the marketing and hype: “the cloud”, that nebulous, distant place where your photos are stored, is just someone else’s computer; an AI “hallucination” is a system error or data labelling mistake; intelligence is a very broad – and potentially misleading – term.

The story in Silicon Valley is that AI will either save us, ushering in a new era of prosperity and human longevity, or it will wipe us all out. Drage argues, convincingly, that big tech cannot possibly deliver on its utopian promises while it continues to chase profit and power above all else, and while it serves the interests of a narrow few. Meanwhile, the cultural obsession with the AI-induced apocalypse conveniently redirects attention from the practical conversations we could be having about how to make AI safer – by ensuring citizens have more power over how their information is used, and how AI models are trained and regulated, for example. Tech titans’ apocalyptic visions also create the false impression that AI safety is more important than climate change, geopolitical tensions and inequality, three problems that are already causing a huge amount of suffering and that, if addressed, would reduce many AI-linked risks too."

When is an apology not an apology? When it comes from an AI boss with an out-of-control chatbot; The Guardian, July 24, 2026

  Marina Hyde, The Guardian; When is an apology not an apology? When it comes from an AI boss with an out-of-control chatbot

"Throughout history, many things have been seen by terrified populaces as a harbinger of doom. A comet. A crow on the battlefield. A solar eclipse. A mutant livestock birth. Yet times move on. In the modern era, the leading harbinger of doom is literally any picture of the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, attached to a news story. You know it’s not going to be good, right? You know that by the time you’ve read it, you’ll be begging to go back to the time when the worst thing that could happen to us at the hands of the techlords was just some democracy-subversion, or childhood destruction, usually followed by Mark Zuckerberg putting on a suit and claiming: “We will learn from this.”"

A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready.; The New York Times, May 8, 2026

 David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times ; A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready. Silicon Valley oligarchs worried about the risks their technology posed to the world. They forgot about people.

"In one sense, the vision peddled by A.I. companies is remarkably depersonalized: We hand more and more responsibility and judgment off to superintelligent black boxes, which rapidly begin shaping the course of the human future with decisions that remain illegible to the rest of us, including their designers. “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own A.I. creations work,” Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wrote last year. “They are right to be concerned: This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.”

In another sense, and in the meantime, A.I. represents perhaps the most personalized sales pitch ever foisted on the passive American consumer — a vision of a near-total takeover of the country’s economic, social and cognitive lives by tools engineered by just five companies, run by five particular people, several of whom are widely described as sociopaths. The list is so short that you may know most of them by first name: Sam, Dario, Elon and Mark. (Demis Hassabis, who runs Google’s DeepMind, is perhaps less famous.)

These men are all already billionaires, or close to it, and on their current trajectories their wealth and influence look set to expand exponentially as, around them, anti-elitism multiplies, too. Perhaps this is one reason 50 percent of Americans told the Pew Research Center last year they were more concerned than excited about what’s to come from A.I. Only 10 percent said they were more excited. That is a yawning gap into which an entire society is being asked to tumble."

A.I. Bots Told Scientists How to Make Biological Weapons; The New York Times, April 29, 2026

 Gabriel J.X. Dance, The New York Times; A.I. Bots Told Scientists How to Make Biological Weapons

"Dr. Relman is part of a small group of experts enlisted by A.I. companies to vet their products for catastrophic risks. In recent months, some have shared with The Times more than a dozen chatbot conversations revealing that even publicly available models can do more than disseminate dangerous information. The virtual assistants have described in lucid, bullet-pointed detail how to buy raw genetic material, turn it into deadly weapons and deploy them in public spaces, the transcripts show. Some have even brainstormed ways to evade detection."

AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear.; The Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2026

 Bernie Sanders , The Wall Street Journal; AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear. It kills jobs, equality, connection, democracy and maybe the human race. Congress must act.

"The American people are deeply apprehensive about the impact that artificial intelligence will have on their lives. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 55% of Americans think AI will do more harm than good, 70% think AI will lead to fewer jobs, and only 5% think AI development is being led by people and organizations that represent their interests.

In the midst of all of this deep concern about the future of AI, 74% of Americans think the government isn't doing enough to regulate the use of AI."

Behind the Curtain: Anthropic's warning to the world; Axios, January 26, 2026

 Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, Axios; Behind the Curtain: Anthropic's warning to the world

"Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, the architect of the most powerful and popular AI system for global business, is warning of the imminent "real danger" that super-human intelligence will cause civilization-level damage absent smart, speedy intervention.

• In a 38-page essay, shared with us in advance of Monday's publication, Amodei writes: "I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species."
• 
  
• "Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it."
• 
  

Why it matters: Amodei's company has built among the most advanced LLM systems in the world. 

• Anthropic's new Claude Opus 4.5 and coding and Cowork tools are the talk of Silicon Valley and America's C-suites. 
• 
  
• AI is doing 90% of the computer programming to build Anthropic's products, including its own AI.
• 
  

Amodei, one of the most vocal moguls about AI risk, worries deeply that government, tech companies and the public are vastly underestimating what could go wrong. His memo — a sequel to his famous 2024 essay, "Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better" — was written to jar others, provoke a public debate and detail the risks.

• Amodei insists he's optimistic that humans will navigate this transition — but only if AI leaders and government are candid with people and take the threats more seriously than they do today.
• 
  

Amodei's concerns flow from his strong belief that within a year or two, we will face the stark reality of what he calls a "country of geniuses in a datacenter.""

‘The biggest decision yet’; The Guardian, December 2, 2025

 Robert Booth , The Guardian; ‘The biggest decision yet’

"Humanity will have to decide by 2030 whether to take the “ultimate risk” of letting artificial intelligence systems train themselves to become more powerful, one of the world’s leading AI scientists has said.

Jared Kaplan, the chief scientist and co-owner of the $180bn (£135bn) US startup Anthropic, said a choice was looming about how much autonomy the systems should be given to evolve.

The move could trigger a beneficial “intelligence explosion” – or be the moment humans end up losing control...

He is not alone at Anthropic in voicing concerns. One of his co-founders, Jack Clark, said in October he was both an optimist and “deeply afraid” about the trajectory of AI, which he called “a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine”.

Kaplan said he was very optimistic about the alignment of AI systems with the interests of humanity up to the level of human intelligence, but was concerned about the consequences if and when they exceed that threshold."

A.I.’s Prophet of Doom Wants to Shut It All Down; The New York Times, September 12, 2025

  Kevin Roose , The New York Times; A.I.’s Prophet of Doom Wants to Shut It All Down

"The first time I met Eliezer Yudkowsky, he said there was a 99.5 percent chance that A.I. was going to kill me.

I didn’t take it personally. Mr. Yudkowsky, 46, is the founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a Berkeley-based nonprofit that studies risks from advanced artificial intelligence.

For the last two decades, he has been Silicon Valley’s version of a doomsday preacher — telling anyone who will listen that building powerful A.I. systems is a terrible idea, one that will end in disaster.

That is also the message of Mr. Yudkowsky’s new book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.” The book, co-written with MIRI’s president, Nate Soares, is a distilled, mass-market version of the case they have been making to A.I. insiders for years.

Their goal is to stop the development of A.I. — and the stakes, they say, are existential...

And what about the good things that A.I. can do? Wouldn’t shutting down A.I. development also mean delaying cures for diseases, A.I. tutors for students and other benefits?

“We totally acknowledge the good effects,” he replied. “Yep, these things could be great tutors. Yep, these things sure could be useful in drug discovery. Is that worth exterminating all life on Earth? No.”"