Hundreds of public figures — including multiple AI “godfathers” and a staggeringly idiosyncratic array of religious, media, and tech figures — just signed a letter calling for a “prohibition” on the race to build AI superintelligence.
Simply titled the “Statement on Superintelligence,” the letter, which was put forward by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), is extremely concise: it calls for a “prohibition on the development of superintelligence,” which it says should not be “lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably” as well as with “strong public buy-in.”
The letter cites recent polling from FLI, which was cofounded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Max Tegmark, showing that only five percent of Americans are in favor of the rapid and unregulated development of advanced AI tools, while more than 73 percent support “robust” regulatory action on AI. Around 64 percent, meanwhile, said they felt that until superintelligence — or an AI model that surpasses human-level intelligence — could be proven to be safe or controllable, it shouldn’t be built.
Signatories include prominent tech and business figures like Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Virgin founder Richard Branson; influential right-wing media voices like “War Room” host Steve Bannon and talk radio host Glenn Beck, as well as left-leaning entertainers like Joseph Gordon-Levitt; Prince Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex; Mike Mullen, the retired US Navy Admiral who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama; friar Paolo Benanti, who serves as the Pope’s AI advisor; and a large consortium of AI experts and scientists including Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio and Nobel Prize laureate Geoffrey Hinton, two consequential AI researchers who each hold the title “godfather of AI.”
“Frontier AI systems could surpass most individuals across most cognitive tasks within just a few years,” Bengio, a Professor at the University of Montreal, said in a press release. “These advances could unlock solutions to major global challenges, but they also carry significant risks.”
“To safely advance toward superintelligence, we must scientifically determine how to design AI systems that are fundamentally incapable of harming people, whether through misalignment or malicious use,” he added. “We also need to make sure the public has a much stronger say in decisions that will shape our collective future.”
Crucially, the letter takes the position that superintelligence — a lofty, scifi-esque vision for AI’s future — is an achievable technical goal, a position that some experts are skeptical of (or at least, believe to be a long way off.)
It’s also worth pointing out that the letter doesn’t clarify the reality that AI doesn’t have to reach superintelligence to cause chaos: as it stands, generative AI tools like chatbots and image and video-creation tools — primitive technologies when compared against imagined future superintelligent AI systems — are upending education, transforming the web into an increasingly misinformation-prone and unreal environment, expediting the creation and dissemination of nonconsensual and illegal pornography, and sending users of all ages spinning into mental health crises and reality breaks that have resulted in outcomes like divorce, homelessness, jail, involuntary commitments, self-harm, and death.
It’s also interesting who didn’t sign the letter. Notable missing names include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, DeepMind cofounder and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, and xAI founder Elon Musk, the latter of whom signed a previous FLI letter from 2023 calling for a pause on the development of AI models more advanced than OpenAI’s GPT-4. (That letter, of course, pretty much did nothing: GPT-5 was released this past summer.) Altman, too, has signed similar letters calling for awareness about large-scale future AI risks, making silence at this juncture striking.
Given that this is one of multiple please-stop-advanced-AI-development-until-we-regulate letters to crop up since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, whether this one will prove to have any bite is an open question.
Still, the latest FLI letter does highlight the breadth of ideologies united on the belief that AI should be regulated, and that how we build AI, and by whom, should be a democratic process. In other words, the public should have a say in what humanity’s technological future looks like — and that shaping AI development shouldn’t be done in a Wild West-like Silicon Valley vacuum lacking regulatory oversight and accountability.
“Many people want powerful AI tools for science, medicine, productivity, and other benefits,” FLI cofounder Anthony Aguirre said in press release. “But the path AI corporations are taking, of racing toward smarter-thanhuman AI that is designed to replace people, is wildly out of step with what the public wants, scientists think is safe, or religious leaders feel is right.”
“Nobody developing these AI systems has been asking humanity if this is OK,” Aguirre added. “We did — and they think it’s unacceptable.”
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