I dropped out of a PhD in AI safety partially for the opposite reason. I didn’t believe AI existential risk was as important as the doomers …

I dropped out of a PhD in AI safety partially for the opposite reason. I didn’t believe AI existential risk was as important as the doomers think. My biggest pet peeve is that no one can really provide tangible pathways to why it matters. During my PhD, my research group (half of whom specialized in engineering risk analysis) did an internal study trying to assess concrete catastrophic AI scenarios. The basic premise was that while we don’t know how AI will evolve, the ways in which humans perish are pretty consistent through history: the horsemen of the apocalypse. And institutions have obviously been very motivated to analyze concrete risks from things like plague, war, etc. You can do a decent risk model by asking how a super-intelligent AI can perturb each of those models. The result: most of the issues (eg cyber-risk) are akin to what economists call structural unemployment - big problems but ultimately resolvable in the long run and not a dealbreaker. The only real concerning issue was bio-risk and it feels like the intervention points there lie more with bio than with AI as a whole (although a holistic approach is needed). I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

Source: Gary Marcus (X) | 2026-09-09