Here’s one theory. According to critics, it benefits AI companies to keep you fixated on apocalypse because it distracts from the very real damage they’re already doing to the world. Tech leaders say they’re just warning us about an inevitable future, and safety is a top priority whether it’s now or later. But others argue what we’re actually seeing is fear mongering, which exaggerates the potential of the technology and serves to boost stock prices. And it encourages a narrative that regulators must stand aside, because these AI companies are the only ones who can stop the bad guys and build this technology responsibly.

“If you portray these technologies as somehow almost supernatural in their danger, it makes us feel like we are powerless, like we are outmatched,” says Shannon Vallor, chair of the ethics of data and artificial intelligence department at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. “As if the only people we could possibly look to would be the companies themselves.”

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“It’s just part of this pattern of unsubstantiated claims of power,” says Emily M Bender, a professor of computational linguistics and natural language processing at the University of Washington, and co-author of the book The AI Con. This isn’t limited to OpenAI and Anthropic, she says, it’s the standard posture for the whole AI industry. “They’re saying ‘look over here’, never mind the environmental destruction and the labour exploitation and all these systems we’re destroying in society. We just have to worry about making sure this thing doesn’t turn into the bad one that destroys humanity.”