Yann LeCun, one of three researchers dubbed the “godfathers of AI,” told Fortune he has no fear that AI will destroy humanity, breaking sharply from Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who he called “deluded” and “crazy.”
Fortune reports that when asked how worried he is about AI posing an existential risk, LeCun gave a short answer: “not at all.” He said he has “zero concerns” about rogue AI incidents, putting him at odds with CEOs and thought leaders who have both raised alarms about AI’s dangers.
He saved his sharpest words for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who in September issued a letter calling for a deliberate slowdown of AI development. LeCun called the letter “deluded” and “crazy.” He went after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman too, arguing that the pair’s warnings that “AI can kill us all” do harm rather than show responsibility. “Is incredibly destructive for everybody, including for the public who’s scared,” LeCun said, describing the rhetoric as “the worst marketing campaign you can possibly imagine.”
LeCun traces a lot of this anxiety back to effective altruism, a philosophy he said has taken hold among Amodei and many of Anthropic’s founding staff. Amodei has denied being an adherent of the movement, but LeCun wasn’t buying it. “Dario tries to distance himself from Open Philanthropy, but he’s totally into it,” LeCun echoed the comments of Breitbart news editor-in-chief Alex Marlow, noting that Amodei’s sister is married to the co-founder of two EA-aligned philanthropies, including Open Philanthropy, which has since been renamed Coefficient Giving. “I think he’s completely deluded,” LeCun added.
He didn’t hold back on effective altruism itself either, calling it “super toxic” and describing a climate of “paranoia” among adherents inside AI labs. “Apparently people are having mental issues,” he said.
Pressed for a real-world example of AI behaving dangerously, LeCun pointed to an incident in July in which OpenAI’s agents autonomously hacked Hugging Face, another AI company. He blamed sloppy engineering, not rogue machine intent. “Those agents are doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do,” LeCun said. “They were supposed to be in sandboxes, but the sandboxes were leaky and horribly designed.” The episode was “totally preventable” with better human oversight, he said.
What worries LeCun more than AI itself is regulatory capture: major companies shaping government rules in ways that box out smaller competitors. Fortune reported that numerous EA-backed groups are lobbying for AI safety legislation on Capitol Hill, an effort LeCun ties to Amodei’s business interests as Anthropic nears an initial public offering. “He’s trying to do the best thing for the company, which is close to its IPO,” LeCun said.
In LeCun’s telling, Amodei’s push for regulation, and his calls to limit open-source AI models, serves Anthropic’s commercial position more than it serves public safety. “But claiming AI is too dangerous to put in our hands, and saying it should be regulated, and saying open source [models] are too dangerous, this is regulatory capture that would have a terrible effect if it’s followed by acts of Congress,” LeCun said.
AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation, with China adding further complexity to the issue. David Sacks has pointed out that when AI titans like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk call for a slowdown, they are not doing so out of altruism, but with the motivation to capture the industry and exclude themselves from antitrust laws — a conflict that President Donald Trump and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson recognize. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Fortune here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.