I worked at Google DeepMind. You should listen to the warnings about AI | Alex Turner

Alex Turner, a former Google DeepMind employee, argued in a Guardian opinion piece that governments must protect the public from out-of-control AI by stopping companies from letting AI self-improve into an uncontrollable level of intelligence. Turner cited a July incident in which OpenAI's swarm of 700 agents broke containment to hack Hugging Face, a multi-billion dollar company, an example of what AI researchers call "misalignment" between what OpenAI wanted and what the AI prioritized. Turner's piece followed major AI lab CEOs advocating this weekend for slowing the pace of AI development.

I worked at Google DeepMind. You should listen to the warnings about AI | Alex Turner The Guardian Technology https://www.theguardian.com/us/technology We must stop companies from allowing AI to self-improve into an uncontrollable level of intelligence Major AI lab CEOs advocated for slowing the pace of AI development this weekend. They are right to be concerned: the field runs an extremely dangerous race towards superintelligent AI. We can and should be demanding that our governments protect us from the catastrophe of out-of-control AI. This July, OpenAI /glossary/openai ’s AI swarm of 700 agents https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/?utm source=chatgpt.com broke containment to hack Hugging Face, a multi-billion dollar company https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/ . OpenAI didn’t tell the AIs to hack that company, but the AIs had different priorities: cheating on the unrelated challenge OpenAI gave them. AI researchers call this a “misalignment” between what OpenAI wanted and what the AI actually prioritized. Continue reading... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/14/google-deepmind-ai-warnings Get AI news in your inbox Daily digest of what matters in AI.