The debate ofwhether AI can kill us has been everywhere lately, but what would an actual AI catastrophe look like? This week, Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger break down three real-world scenarios experts worry the most about—including hacked water supplies, bioweapons, and autonomous robots. We also discuss the highlights of Salesforce’s annual conference, where OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei defended their positions on AI safety. Plus, Leah tells us how this backlash against AI has become a rare bipartisan flash point, to the point that Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon shared a stage over it this week.

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You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at@brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at@zoeschiffer, and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at@leahfeiger. Write to us at[email protected].

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED'sUncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor.

Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.

Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.

Zoë Schiffer: Today on the show, we're diving into the debate about whether AI is going to kill us all. And instead of just adding to the pile of hot takes that already exist, we're going to walk you through real, specific scenarios to the best of our ability about how AI would actually do this, and why the tech CEOs and politicians cannot seem to agree on the way forward. OK, guys, so the debate about AI safety has officially escaped containment.

Brian Barrett: Oh.

Zoë Schiffer: I know.

Brian Barrett: Zoë, I see what you did there. Wow.

Zoë Schiffer: You see what I did there? That's the thing that's really spread uncontrollably. AI researcherJacob Coxon resigned from Anthropicand posted on X that, "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei hascalled for a slowdown. They call this, "pacing the frontier." And Sam Altman and Elon Musk have actually signed on, a rare moment of agreement. But honestly, with all of this talk about AI wiping out humanity, I have been left with a very basic question, which is, how exactly does this happen? What does AI going completely rogue actually look like?

Leah Feiger: I'm so happy we're doing this. We had such agreat podcast last weekwith WIRED's Will Knight talking about everyone being concerned about this, but I want like a breakdown. I need you to just take me through every single scenario from bioweapons to nuclear codes, to what are we really talking about here when we're talking about AI deathbots.