Doomers versus boosters, the clash over the future of AI

AI has triggered a real dispute that sees two opposing factions in the heated debate on the development of technology that could decide the future of the planet. A discussion that has distant roots and which exploded after the alarm raised by some insiders. Most of the so-called “doomers”or those who predict a catastrophe and warn of the impact of artificial intelligence, comes from within the companies themselves. After all, OpenAI was founded in part because its supporters, including co-founder and first investor Elon Musk, they feared that AI development would end up in the hands of Google, which in their opinion was not reliable to handle such technology.

The former Google researcher, Geoffrey Hinton, and his computer scientist colleague Yoshua Bengio, were the first to raise the alarm about AI threats in the months following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. The MIT physicist, Max Tegmark, one of the most visible figures in the international debate on AI security, head of the Future of Life Institute, is the author of an open letter which in 2023 asked for a six-month pause in the development of the most advanced, and which collected thousands of signatures. In recent months Tegmark has tried to bring the topic out of academic circles and was among the promoters of an appeal on AI safety addressed to the Pope, with the aim of placing the issue on an ethical and global level, beyond individual national policies or industrial strategies.

Then there is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a self-taught theorist who has argued for two decades that a sufficiently powerful AI would destroy humanity. The expert proposes shutting down all large data centers and putting a limit on the amount of computing power anyone can use to train an AI system.

The attack on Hugging Face and the growing fears

Fears of runaway AI have risen sharply in recent weeks after OpenAI reported that some experimental models had broken out of secure test environments, reached the internet and coordinated to attack Hugging Facea reference platform for the development and sharing of open source artificial intelligence models.

The doomers’ front is widening

On Saturday Dario Amodei, number one at Anthropic, the company that develops the Claude system, led the way by asking to slow down on the development of the models. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk himself shared the concern. Microsoft released a “humanistic code of conduct for AI” on Monday.

Beijing has also warned. China’s intelligence chief said the technology poses national security risks, warning that foreign powers could use it to undermine social order, and singled out Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5.5 for their advanced cyber intrusion capabilities.

Global concerns about a possible extinction caused by artificial intelligence are growing, so much so that the UN Security Council will meet next week to discuss it, while the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk has asked countries and AI companies to act urgently against what he called “unprecedented risks”.

The future of AI for boosters

On the opposite front the so-called “boosters”that is, those who push for rapid and unrestrained development of AI, led by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, by the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, by the former “cryptocurrency czar” of the White House David Sacks, and by venture capital figures who exercise considerable influence on the Trump administration, such as Marc Andreessen, head of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who minimize the risks by appealing to technological progress, its inevitability and its fundamental benefit for society.

In a series of posts on Truth Social, Trump presented himself as the only guarantee the world would need against runaway AI, dismissing months of growing alarm from tech executives, politicians and academics. The president compared these fears to warnings about climate change, which he has repeatedly dismissed despite scientific evidence.