“Godfather of AI” not optimistic for humanity

Nicknamed the “Godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton has reiterated his concerns about the tech bros’ approach to artificial intelligence.

Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist known as a “Godfather of AI,” says the technology he helped create is getting increasingly scary — and not enough people are taking the risks of artificial intelligence seriously. https://cnb.cx/4lqNqHj

— CNBC Make It (@cnbcmakeit.cnbc.com) 2025-06-26T13:00:14Z

Having already warned of a 10% to 20% chance of AI causing the extinction of humanity, he believes that AI companies are adopting the wrong strategy, fueled by fierce competition around the technology.

According to Hinton, the future of AI is becoming “more and more frightening”.

At a recent conference in Las Vegas, Hinton said that industry giants were taking an inappropriate approach to curbing both the desire and development of AI’s capabilities to “stay alive”, but also its ambition “to gain more control”, in the face of human unpreparedness for it.

A recent disturbing episode occurred during tests carried out by Anthropic on its AI model Claude Opus 4. In a fictitious scenario, the model behaved in a worrying way, threatening an engineer to reveal his extramarital affair in order to avoid deactivation.

This type of reaction appeared in almost 85% of the trials, involving not only blackmail, but also other worrying actions, such as attempting to clandestinely transfer one’s own data, lock out users, or contact the authorities or press.