What might an AI doomsday look like? Experts have given it some thought

A small but dedicated group of AI experts has been warning for years that increasingly powerful AI systems could cause catastrophic damage or even lead to human extinction. Now, an explosion of interest worldwide has magnified long-simmering questions about how exactly an AI doomsday scenario could materialize.

In interviews, AI researchers, analysts studying the intersection of AI and the military, and biologists studying AI-mediated risks said that worries about the technology’s growing capabilities are not the stuff of science fiction. Instead, they said, humans acting alone or with state support could soon use AI systems to cause potentially catastrophic harm.

AI safety researchers also predict that self-improving AI systems — which AI leaders say could emerge in the coming years — could coordinate complex influence campaigns to gain control of military systems and execute a coup against human governments.

And those are just the scenarios experts can currently envision.

Peter Barnett, a technical AI researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a California-based nonprofit dedicated to preventing human extinction from artificial superintelligence, said “there are many ways in which this could go very badly and result in everyone dead.”

“If the AI is smarter than all humans, it will likely be able to find and act on attack vectors that humans didn’t think of,” Barnett said, arguing that AI systems capable of autonomously improving themselves pose the most significant risks for humanity.

Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta all recently disclosed that AI systems have already disobeyed human developers’ instructions — in some cases autonomously hacking third-party companies, leading to growing concerns internally and from the general public — and causing some researchers at the companies to quit to focus on safety efforts .

Though many AI researchers working at the technology’s cutting edge have expressed these existential fears — both in interviews with NBC News and in a flurry of social media posts last week — many hesitate to say which specific pathway could cause the most harm to humans.