Autonomous AI Poses Existential Threat—And It’s Almost Here: Former Google CEO

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee's Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights Subcommittee on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 21, 2011. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) is coming—and that it could pose an existential threat to humanity.

“We’re soon going to be able to have computers running on their own, deciding what they want to do,” Schmidt, who has long spoken out about both the dangers and the benefits AI poses to humanity, said during a Dec. 15 appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”

“That’s a dangerous point: When the system can self improve, we need to seriously think about unplugging it.”

Schmidt is far from the first tech leader to raise these concerns.

The rise of consumer AI products such as ChatGPT has been unprecedented in the past two years, with major improvements to the language-based model. Other AI models have become increasingly adept at creating visual art, photographs, and full-length videos that are nearly indistinguishable from reality in many cases.

For some, the technology calls to mind the “Terminator” series, which is set in a dystopian future in which AI takes over the planet.

For all the fears that ChatGPT and similar platforms have raised, consumer AI services available today still fall into a category experts would consider “dumb AI.” These AI are trained on a massive set of data but lack consciousness, sentience, or the ability to behave autonomously.

Schmidt and other experts are not particularly worried about these systems.

Rather, they’re concerned about more advanced AI, known in the tech world as “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), describing far more complex AI systems that could have sentience and, by extension, could develop conscious motives independent from and potentially dangerous to human interests.

Schmidt said no such systems exist today yet and that we’re rapidly moving toward a new, in-between type of AI: one lacking the sentience that would define an AGI and still able to act autonomously in fields such as research and weaponry.

“I’ve done this for 50 years. I’ve never seen innovation at this scale,” Schmidt said of the rapid developments in AI complexity.

Schmidt said that more developed AI would have many benefits to humanity—and could have just as many “bad things like weapons and cyber attacks.”

The Challenge

The challenge, Schmidt said, is multifaceted.

He repeated a common sentiment among tech leaders: If autonomous AGI-like systems are inevitable, it will require massive cooperation among both corporate interests and governments internationally to avoid potentially devastating consequences.

That’s easier said than done. AI provides U.S. competitors such as China, Russia, and Iran with a potential leg up against the United States that would be difficult to achieve otherwise.

And within the tech industry, there’s currently massive competition among major corporations—Google, Microsoft, and others—to outcompete rivals, a situation that raises inherent risks of improper security protocols for dealing with a rogue AI, Schmidt said.

“The competition is so fierce, there’s a concern that one of the companies will decide to omit the [safety] steps and then somehow release something that really does some harm,” Schmidt said.

Such harms would only become evident after the fact, he said.

The challenge is greater on the international stage, where adversarial nations are likely to see the new technology as revolutionary for their efforts to challenge U.S. global hegemony and expand their own influence.

“The Chinese are clever, and they understand the power of a new kind of intelligence for their industrial might, their military might, and their surveillance system,” Schmidt said.

As a result, U.S. leaders in the field find themselves forced to balance existential concerns for humanity with the potential for the United States to fall behind its adversaries, which could be catastrophic to global stability.

In the worst case, such systems could be used to engineer crippling biological and nuclear weapons, particularly by terrorist groups such as ISIS.

For this reason, Schmidt said, it’s absolutely crucial that the United States continue to innovate in the field and ultimately maintain technological dominance over China and other adversarial states and groups.

Industry Leaders Demand Regulation

Regulation of the field remains insufficient, Schmidt said. But he said he expects that governments’ focus on enhancing safeguards around the tech will accelerate dramatically in the coming years.

Asked by anchor George Stephanopoulos whether governments were doing enough to regulate it, Schmidt replied, “Not yet, but they will, because they'll have to.”

Despite some initial interest in the field—hearings, legislative proposals, and other initiatives—emerging during the current 118th Congress, this session seems to be on track to end without any major legislation related to AI.

President-elect Donald Trump has warned of the vast risks posed by AI, saying during an appearance on Logan Paul’s “Impaulsive” podcast that it’s “really powerful stuff.”

He also spoke of the need to maintain competitiveness with adversaries.

“It brings with it difficulty, but we have to be at the forefront,” Trump said. “It’s going to happen, and if it’s going to happen, we have to take the lead over China. China’s the primary threat.”

Schmidt’s takes on both the benefits and the challenges of the technology align with other industry reactions.

In June 2024, OpenAI and Google employees signed a letter warning of “serious risks” posed by AI and calling for greater government oversight of the field.

Elon Musk has put forward similar warnings, saying that Google is seeking to create a “digital God” through its DeepMind AI program.

In August, these concerns intensified after it was discovered that an AI system took autonomous action to avoid being shut down—raising fears that humanity is already losing control over its creation as governments remain inactive.