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LeCun has 'zero concerns' about AI wiping out humanity, recent 'rogue' incidents
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Turing Award winner Yann LeCun says he has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity. LeCun shared the 2018 prize with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for deep learning research. The trio is often called the godfathers of modern artificial intelligence. Nearly a decade later, LeCun is the only one of the three untroubled by existential risk.
Hinton and Bengio now warn openly that advanced systems could threaten people. LeCun believes many of those risks are overstated. He argues that leaders at top AI companies stoke fear unnecessarily. That messaging, he says, is counterproductive and "incredibly destructive."
He is equally unfazed by recent "rogue" incidents, including OpenAI agents autonomously hacking Hugging Face in July. He blames poor oversight and "leaky" sandboxes rather than the models themselves. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the episode the responsibility of OpenAI management.
LeCun reserves sharper criticism for effective altruism, calling the movement "super toxic" and "a complete disaster." AI safety researchers, he says, "usually have an agenda to push." Financial Times reports indicate staff at OpenAI, Anthropic and the U.K. AI Security Institute have sought counseling over AI fears.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is "completely deluded" and "crazy," LeCun said. Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman declaring "AI can kill us all" amounts to "the worst marketing campaign you can possibly imagine." Anthropic says its employees represent a diverse range of views.
LeCun spoke amid a viral post from former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon, who claimed staff "earnestly believe" AI could kill everyone by decade's end. Such statements leave the public scared, LeCun said.
LeCun was interviewed in New York, near the offices of his new company, AMI Labs. He intends to keep pushing back against doomsday framing. Whether rivals adopt his calmer tone remains to be seen.
