AI ‘godfather’ Yann LeCun has ‘zero concerns’ about human extinction, says Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is ‘deluded’

Yann LeCun won the 2018 Turing Award—computer science’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize—along with fellow AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for their work on deep learning, the neural network technology that underpins today’s AI boom. But today, nearly a decade later, LeCun is the only one of the three AI “godfathers” who is not deeply concerned about the risks of artificial intelligence. In fact, he thinks many of those risks are overblown, and that the constant warning about them from executives at some of the leading AI companies is misguided and counter productive.

LeCun isn’t worried “at all” about AI wiping out humanity, and he has “zero concerns” about the recent string of rogue AI incidents, including OpenAI’s agents autonomously hacking of Hugging Face in July. He attributes the incidents to poor human oversight and system design, and says they’re “totally preventable,” a belief also held by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who this month called the Hugging Face incident the “responsibility of OpenAI management.”

“Those agents are doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do,” LeCun said. “They were supposed to be in sandboxes, but the sandboxes were leaky and horribly designed.” Many AI labs lack a fundamental understanding of cybersecurity, he said, something an OpenAI safety researcher also called out this week as one of the main reasons AI may cause “great harm to the world.”

Many people working in AI safety “usually have an agenda to push,” LeCun says, and then clarifies that he’s talking about Effective Altruism, or EA, the philosophical movement that has been obsessed with the risks AI poses to humanity. EA was little known among the general public until it made mainstream news headlines in recent weeks after a viral social media post from a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher named Jacob Coxon, who claimed the employees at these companies “earnestly believe [AI] could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

LeCun thinks EA is “super toxic” and a “complete disaster.” Its adherents........

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