Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner dismissed warnings that artificial intelligence (AI) could threaten human survival on Friday, calling the rhetoric overblown after a former Anthropic researcher’s exit stirred fresh debate over AI safety.
AI Safety Debate Continues
“What I didn’t like this week is these hyperbolic scare tactics, which I think are hiding behind a political agenda,” Gerstner told CNBC’s “Halftime Report.”
Gerstner said AI firms have taken precautions compared with earlier tech booms. “We ignored all of the extraordinary steps already being taken, unlike in the age of the internet, unlike with social media, to get ahead of these downsides,” he said. Altimeter holds stakes in Anthropic, OpenAI and enterprise AI vendors Glean and Databricks Inc., which focus on data and large-scale language systems.
His remarks followed a viral post. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit this week, accusing AI companies on X of “gambling with our lives” in the pursuit of superintelligence. The comments added to an already growing public backlash nationwide over the buildout of massive AI data centers.
Delangue Downplays Coxon’s Authority on AI Risk
In an X post on Friday, Hugging Face‘s CEO Clement Delangue also questioned the outsized attention on Coxon’s warning. He wrote on X, “Sorry, but asking Jacob about AI extinction risk is like asking your AC guy about climate change.”
In an earlier post, Delangue responded to Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger, who estimated that there was a 10% chance AI could cause human extinction within the next decade. Delangue argued, “If they truly believe the risk is that high… then we need 100x more research and understanding of it. That requires them to openly share their models, datasets, training code, and agent traces.”
Former OpenAI Researcher Warns of Autonomous Risk
Not everyone agrees the alarm is misplaced.
Daniel Kokotajlo, former OpenAI governance researcher and executive director of the AI Futures Project, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that model advances are trending in “a very concerning direction.” He said, “It seems like a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, they really will be able to have AIs that can do the entire research process themselves, that will be autonomously self-improving, and that could go very badly.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is also escalating his push for tougher AI regulation after AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton talked about the possibility of superintelligent AI killing humans.
The split reactions highlight how unsettled the debate over AI safety remains, even among those closest to the technology.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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