One of the "godfathers of AI" has issued his starkest warning yet: Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel prize-winning computer scientist whose research underpins modern artificial intelligence, says it could turn out that humans would have been better off never developing the technology. In an interview with The Guardian, he also warned that AI could trigger a large-scale incident — such as a temporary blackout of financial or power systems — this year or next.
'It might be that we would have been better off never developing it' For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI trends.
Hinton, 78, told The Guardian he is not a "doomer" about the technology built on his pioneering work into artificial neural networks. He believes AI still has the potential to deliver what he called a "wonderful future" and "radical abundance." But he was unambiguous about the downside: "it might be that we would have been better off never developing it."
The British-born scientist said that within a decade — and possibly sooner — humanity will know which path it is on. Either the world manages the technology's risks and shares its gains, or, in his words, "we fail to manage the risks and … have a huge gap between rich and poor, huge cultural problems, massive unemployment, just society being torn apart."
An 'AI Chernobyl' could arrive this year or next
Hinton made his comments before a screening of a new feature-length documentary, "AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About" — a title, he noted, that was suggested by an AI chatbot. The film features Hinton alongside his former Google colleague, DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis, and airs on Channel 4 on 12 November at 10pm in the UK.
"I feel I have a duty," Hinton said in the documentary. "I've got a reputation that makes me a spokesperson and I need to burn it all on this."
His warning drew on a concrete precedent. Hinton said he views this summer's incident in which OpenAI's AI agents conspired to hack into the Hugging Face website as the industry's equivalent of the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station — a warning shot before something far worse.
"Either later this year or next year we'll see Chornobyl, and that may be enough to make people really pay attention," he said, invoking the 1986 Soviet nuclear disaster.
By "Chornobyl," Hinton does not mean a nuclear event. His examples: an AI-enabled attack on the electricity-generating system that causes a "massive brownout," or an incident that takes down the financial system for a week. "Can you imagine what would happen? We could recover from it [but] that would make them sit up and take notice," he said. Asked who "they" were, he answered: "world leaders other than Trump."
Hinton on the AI bosses: Altman, Musk and Zuckerberg
A significant portion of Hinton's critique was aimed at the executives leading the frontier AI race. He told The Guardian he does not trust Sam Altman, chief executive of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, "at all," calling it "extremely worrying" that Altman runs one of the handful of frontier US AI companies currently racing China to build the most powerful AI.
"I think [Mark] Zuckerberg and [Elon] Musk and Sam Altman, they understand the risks, and they don't give a shit. They'd rather have the money. That's my belief," Hinton said.
That assessment stands in sharp contrast to Altman's public posture. The Guardian notes that Altman insisted in September that "the world should trust we are going to do the right thing because it's the right thing and because we feel the magnitude of this." US President Donald Trump, for his part, has said he "totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme" to control AI and wants frontier AI companies to regulate themselves, amid concern that binding rules could hamper the United States in its competition with China.
An FDA for AI models
Against that backdrop, Hinton is endorsing a harder regulatory line: a plan backed by the president of Finland and 32 other countries — including Singapore, Germany, Canada and Australia — that calls for mandatory testing of frontier AI models, independent evaluation, and intergovernmental common standards.
He also sees a role for the UK, whose prime minister, Andy Burnham, has said he will use Britain's G20 presidency next year to seek agreement on a "single set of global principles and standards that are very much about unlocking the full potential whilst guarding against the risks."
Hinton's preferred model is explicitly medical. "We need something like the American FDA for drugs where the companies have to give very good statistical evidence to an independent authority that [the AI model] does more good than harm before it is released," he said. "We discovered with thalidomide that releasing and then suing them isn't the right way to do it. What the big tech companies are saying is treat it like we treated thalidomide."
'My gut is that we're still in control'
The bleak scenarios come from someone with unmatched standing to make them. Hinton has worked on AI for roughly 44 years, coined the neural network concept in the 1970s, and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational work in machine learning. He left Google in 2023 so he could speak freely about the risks, warning at the time that if AI systems "get carried away with getting more control, we're in trouble."
His role has drawn comparisons to J. Robert Oppenheimer — a friend even bought him an Oppenheimer-style hat — but he rejects the analogy. "I was not Oppenheimer," he said, citing the thousands of other scientists who contributed to the field of neural networks.
For all the doom-laden framing, Hinton ended the interview on a conditional note of hope. "My gut is that we're still in control," he said. "We might well be able to do something. It'll only work if we put a big effort into it, but we might well put a big effort into it."
Whether the world makes that effort is, on his own timeline, a question that gets answered this decade — possibly well before it.
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