The AI Safety Debate Has Lost the Plot. We Asked 10 Experts What the Real Nightmares Are

Curiosity soon replaced my knee-jerk irritation. The summer of 2026 was a clear turning point in the AI narrative. Less than four years after ChatGPT launched, OpenAI software broke out of a supposedly safe test environment and hacked into a major open-source platform, Hugging Face. These bits of software—AI agents—were assigned human attributes: They had “gone rogue,” displayed “bad behavior,” “cheated.” Soon after, former and current Anthropic researchers suggested that advanced AI might kill us all in the next decade.

Is any of this real? On the one hand, from my desk as a Silicon Valley correspondent, I often hear that workers in the AI labs are stunned by the advancements they’re seeing. On the other, the end of humanity seems extremely far-fetched.