Could AI really end humanity? Post your questions for our tech reporters now
The Guardian is hosting a live Q&A session with its technology reporters to address recent alarming claims about the potential dangers of superintelligent AI. The discussion aims to evaluate whether current fears are justified, particularly following warnings from industry leaders like Elon Musk and reports from Anthropic regarding malicious AI usage. Readers are invited to submit questions about AI risks, media coverage fairness, and the balance between benefits and safety concerns.
- ▪Anthropic reported that various actors have attempted to use its models to design weapons, create pathogens, and surveil dissidents.
- ▪Elon Musk has claimed that advanced AI could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
- ▪The Guardian's tech team, including Aisha Down, Dan Milmo, and Blake Montgomery, will host a live session to answer public questions.
- ▪A safety expert at Anthropic estimates there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could cause an event wiping out humanity.
The Guardian — Tech publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under tech. We currently carry 118 of its stories.
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — Tech |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/community/live/2026/sep/18/could-ai-really-end-humanity-technology-qanda |
| Publication time | Fri, 18 Sep 2026 07:14:11 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-18T07:58:45.265Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-18T07:58:45.265Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Z_K7UaXDzAkz · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
44m ago03.14 EDTWelcome to the conversationThe last week or so has seen disturbing claims about the capacity of superintelligent AI to destroy the planet. It has also seen warnings coming from figures within the industry itself, including Anthropic’s report that criminals, state-sponsored groups, spyware vendors, scientists and propagandists have attempted to use its models to “design missiles and bombs, create deadly pathogens and surveil dissidents” and Elon Musk’s claim it could be “more dangerous than nukes”.Our reporting team has been trying to make sense of the scale of these claims.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — Tech.
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