Everything’s fine! Take it from the cofounder of Palantir.
In an X post on Saturday, Joe Lonsdale brushed aside the salient worry that advanced AI systems could cause mass human extinction, a concern that numerous engineers and leaders from frontier AI labs have raised in recent days and weeks.
“The world is going to be alright, guys,” Lonsdale said. “Leaders have big responsibilities and challenges ahead, but it doesn’t help to scare everyone. We are on top of it.”
That’s unlikely enough to calm the nerves of a human population that’s been repeatedly told that AI could take control and do all manner of untoward things, including taking everyone’s jobs.
After Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon quit the company this week and issued dire warnings that frontier AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives,” numerous leaders echoed his concern in posts and essays.
On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a blog post that AI swarms could soon take over the entire internet. He called for more stringent safety regulations and a global, coordinated slowdown on AI development.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue all said they agreed with Amodei.
Lonsdale? Not so much.
Lonsdale is a famously conservative contrarian. He founded the University of Austin in 2021 alongside now-CBS News editor Bari Weiss, which counts “the unhindered pursuit of truth without cancel culture” as one of its core principles.
“It’s not as much about the politics as it was about being contrarian. I’ve always relished standing out from the crowd, standing up and disagreeing with everyone,” he once told Business Insider in a 2017 interview.
The company he helped found and later left, Palantir, builds AI software that helps governments and corporations analyze large amounts of data. The company has several lucrative contracts with the US government. It credited 93% year-over-year revenue growth in Q2 to companies purchasing its enterprise software.
In his weekend take that everything’s going to be just fine, Lonsdale appears aligned with President Donald Trump. The president has repeatedly scoffed at AI doomerism, emphasizing the need to stay ahead of China in the AI race.
In Ireland on Sunday, Trump said AI leaders who have issued warnings about the tech’s potential for misuse are “bringing up things that won’t happen.”
“Whoever wins with AI wins,” the president told reporters.
