People have been writing about the existential risk AI potentially poses to humanity for decades. But it was the resignation of Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic employee who claimed AI companies are "gambling with our future" in their efforts to achieve superintelligence, that made talk of AI's threat to humanity's existence go mainstream. BBC journalist Victoria Derbyshire, hoping for a more sober view from the Noble-Prize winner and godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, was shocked when he conceded that giving AI a 10% chance of eradicating humanity was "not an unreasonable estimate". At the same time, Vice President of the United States J.D. Vance casually admitted in a recent interview that he wouldn't be surprised if "the Antichrist is walking amongst us" and speculated about the fact that we might be living in end times. What is going on?

Could we really be living through end times? Is AI really an existential threat to humanity? If so, why are the companies developing this technology allowed to continue their work unimpeded by governments? And how should we explain the strange synergy between MAGA politics and Silicon Valley when it comes to talk about the end of the world?

Alexis Papazoglou is Managing Editor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously senior editor for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, and a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway. He is also host of the podcast, “The Philosopher and the News”.

Émile P. Torres is a philosopher and historian whose work focuses on existential threats to civilization and humanity. They have published on a wide range of topics, including machine superintelligence, emerging technologies, and religious eschatology, as well as the history and ethics of human extinction. Their forthcoming book is Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation (Routledge).