Broadcast news anchors spent last week warning viewers that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity within a decade, even as President Trump dismissed the claims as a “hoax.”
On the Sept. 14 broadcast of NBC’s “Today,” co-host Savannah Guthrie opened the show with an alarm: “Doomsday warning! The country’s leading developers of AI coming forward to call for a slowdown in the technology, saying humanity itself is at risk.” Guthrie then interviewed Josh Tyrangiel of The Atlantic, asking how worried Americans should be. His answer: “Extremely worried.” Tyrangiel pointed to what he called the “Hugging Face incident” from July, when AI bots reportedly acted independently to carry out a cyberattack on the AI startup Hugging Face.
The following night, ABC’s “World News Tonight” anchor David Muir framed the story as a clash between the president and AI insiders. “We do begin tonight with President Trump rejecting the new and dire warnings about AI, even as three of the top AI rivals agree now that it’s time to slow it down, alarmed by what they’re seeing and how quickly this is all moving,” Muir said. He added that a former AI researcher has claimed there’s a “greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans in a decade,” while Trump insists the only guardrail AI needs is “a high-IQ president.”
NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Llamas struck a similar note: “We begin with President Trump thundering into the debate today over AI regulation and perhaps the fate of humanity, saying that any predictions that artificial intelligence could destroy the human race are, quote, ‘a hoax.’ It comes as some of the country’s top AI leaders say the opposite, that the danger is real and must be regulated.”
CBS Evening News took a different approach, giving airtime to David Sacks, Trump’s former AI czar, to push back on the panic. “I think we are in a political season right now. It feels like a panic is being ginned up. And so, I do think that the threat here has been exaggerated,” Sacks said. When CBS reporter Jo Ling Kent pressed him on Trump’s use of the word “hoax,” Sacks responded: “The hoax is that somehow we’re going to be extinct as a species within a few years because of AI, and therefore we have to stop completely.”
A Familiar Playbook
The sudden wave of AI extinction warnings has echoes of past doomsday forecasts on climate. In 1990, a PBS documentary series called “Race to Save the Planet” featured narrator Meryl Streep predicting that “by the year 2000 – that’s less than 10 years away – the earth’s climate will be warmer than it’s been in over 100,000 years,” warning of “enormous calamities in a very short time” absent immediate action.
That prediction, like many that followed it, did not come to pass on the timeline described. Americans have now watched decades of similarly urgent warnings arrive and pass without the promised catastrophe — a pattern worth remembering when the same institutions demand immediate, drastic action on a new subject.
Notably, the loudest voices sounding the AI alarm are the very companies building the technology. Whether that makes their warnings more credible, or gives them more reason to want the pace of AI development controlled on their terms, is a fair question the networks largely skipped past.
Americans without technical backgrounds in computer science are being asked to take these warnings on faith from self-described experts — the same posture that has been used before to demand government control in the name of averting disaster. History suggests skepticism is warranted before Americans are told they must submit to a new round of expert-driven mandates or face annihilation.
