Musk Warns of Killer AI — While He and the Rest of Silicon Valley Cash In on AI That Kills

The bitter courtroom brawl between Elon Musk and Sam Altman captivating the tech industry this week revolves in no small part around fears that artificial intelligence technologies both men are building could spiral out of control and exterminate humanity. Such far-looking scenarios obscure the fact that tech companies are enlisting to kill today. Musk’s break with OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015, is in a sense a lawsuit about safety. He contends that Altman betrayed the company’s original nonprofit mission of safely and responsibly pursuing artificial intelligence for the public benefit by converting it into the revenue-maximizing behemoth it has become. According to Musk, the stakes of this are existential for the human race: “It could kill us all,” he testified on Tuesday. “We don’t want to have a ‘Terminator’ outcome.” The AI safety community frequently invokes these dystopian scenarios to both warn the public about the technology’s risks and implicitly boast of its great power. While such a science-fiction future may lay ahead, these warnings overlook the deadly present. Artificial intelligence is already targeting humans with the blessing of Musk and his rivals. Musk and others who caution about an uprising of sentient killer machines are anticipating the emergence