Silicon Valley China hawks, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei among them, fear the country surpassing US’s AI lead as much as superintelligence destroying humanity

When reporters asked Donald Trump this week if he supported calls to slow down the development of artificial intelligence out of growing fears for cybersecurity, public safety and the fate of humanity, he said no. His argument: China.

“We’re leading China in AI,” Trump said. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to ⁠keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins.”

After a week of alarming warnings about artificial intelligence’s potential to destroy the world as we know it, our technology reporters Aisha Down, Blake Montgomery and Dan Milmo answer your questions on the reality of the AI threat

In realistic terms how would artificial intelligence actually kill me? What is the main proxy threat? Nuclear war, death due to breakdown of society, a virus? I hear all these reports it could kill us but still unsure how that could practically happen? To be honest all sounds too wooly to really take seriously. Pottys99

Aisha: For what it’s worth, it seems unlikely that AI at this point can significantly change the equation around bioweapons or viruses … What has prevented bioweapon attacks through the past decades is not the difficulty of inventing new deadly viruses, but other, more prosaic issues. Consider the failure of Aum Shinrikyo to kill vast numbers of people with botulism and anthrax by spraying these around central Tokyo. There are a lot of logistical challenges, and chemical weapons seem more straightforward. Those exist without AI needing to invent new ones.