Geoffrey Hinton warns of AI blackout risk
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The gist
Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton says AI could trigger a Chernobyl-like power or banking shutdown within a year.
He argues leaders and AI chiefs aren't prioritizing safety over money.
Background
Geoffrey Hinton is a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist widely called the 'godfather of artificial intelligence', who laid the foundations for machine learning and neural networks and formerly worked on AI at Google. He cut ties with Google to speak more freely about AI risks. He made the warnings while promoting the documentary 'AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About' (a title suggested by an AI chatbot), which features him and his former Google colleague Demis Hassabis.
How it unfolded
- Nov 3, 2026Speaking to The Guardian ahead of a documentary screening, Hinton warned AI could be near to triggering a major incident such as a power or banking shutdown.
- Nov 4, 2026Hinton said 'Either later this year or next year we'll see Chernobyl', warning AI could cause a temporary blackout of financial or power systems. He said he was not a 'doomer' but that humanity would have been 'better off' never developing the technology.
- Nov 4, 2026Hinton said he does not trust Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk to prioritize safety over money, calling Altman's leadership of a frontier US AI company extremely worrying amid the race with China.
- Nov 6, 2026In an interview with The i Paper, Hinton warned humanity is racing toward superintelligent machines without a solid plan to control them, and that a kill switch would not save us.
Key terms
- Chernobyl
- A 1986 nuclear reactor explosion in Ukraine that became the worst nuclear disaster in history.
- neural networks
- A computational model in machine learning inspired by the structure and functions of biological neural networks.
Source: Wikipedia
Who’s saying what
- Expert
- Hinton says a Chernobyl-like incident may be what finally makes people pay attention, though he believes 'we're still in control' and could act with a big effort.
- Caution
- Hinton says he does not trust Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk to put safety ahead of money.
- Official
- OpenAI's Sam Altman insisted in September that the world should trust OpenAI to do the right thing because it feels the magnitude of the technology.
Still unverified
It remains unclear whether the predicted incidents will actually occur; Hinton noted humanity will know within a decade if it manages risks or faces massive unemployment and cultural problems.