Why do leading AI labs warn about existential risk while continuing to race toward it?

Lens adapted to this topic: How warnings may serve industry interests

The critical reading treats existential-risk warnings as potentially sincere but also strategically useful. By portraying frontier AI as extraordinarily powerful and dangerous, companies can justify large investments, attract attention, strengthen claims for regulation that burdens smaller rivals, build safety-based trust, and frame their own firms as necessary stewards. Critics also argue that the scientific basis for precise doom probabilities and inevitable superintelligence remains weak.

• Warnings can function as public relations by making companies appear unusually responsible while preserving their authority to keep developing frontier systems.
• Safety regulation and independent testing may create a competitive moat for established labs by imposing costs that smaller competitors cannot easily bear.
• Critics argue that existential-risk rhetoric can attract investment and political influence by presenting AI as both exceptionally dangerous and exceptionally important.
• There is no established path from today’s AI systems to superintelligence, and critics say precise extinction probabilities lack a rigorous evidential basis.
• Structural competition for capital, talent, market position, and geopolitical advantage can make safety subordinate to speed even when executives acknowledge risk.

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