Politics
Texas Republicans denounce GOP statewide candidate over xenophobic post
Prominent Texas Republicans are denouncing Bo French, a Republican nominee to join the state’s railroad commission, after he made a xenophobic post describing a group of Asian American students attending a University of Texas football game as a “problem.”
French posted a photo on X of UT students celebrating in the crowd and wrote: “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
Sen. John Cornyn immediately condemned the post as racist and called on other Republican officials to speak out.
“This is the Republican nominee for statewide office,” Cornyn wrote on X. “Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized. This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also rejected French’s message in a statement shared with POLITICO, saying the picture instead showed Texans united behind their college football team, which had just defeated top-ranked Ohio State.
“That is not my message,” Abbott said. “A selective picture of Longhorn fans celebrating our biggest home victory-ever-actually shows a way that Texans unite. We all support our college football teams.”
“The way we win the state is the same way we win football games,” Abbott added. “We unite under the brand of Texas.”
Abbott also defended Texas’ hard-line immigration policies, saying unity “doesn’t mean that Texas cannot also lead in having the toughest immigration laws of any state in America and freezing H1B visas at our universities.”
Several Republican members of the Texas House also joined in the backlash. State Rep. Lacey Hull urged French to remove the post, writing: “This post breaks my heart. I see college kids cheering on their football team. I see Texans.”
State Rep. Jared Patterson called the post “racist” and said it demeaned students because of their race or ethnicity.
“There is absolutely nothing Christian or conservative about looking at a crowd of young Texans at a college football game, seeing the color of their skin, and declaring that they are a ‘problem,’” Patterson wrote on X. “These are 20-year-old kids cheering for their university — not political props and not targets for racial attacks.”
Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows similarly wrote that opposing immigration policy does not justify “demeaning people because of their race or ethnicity,” adding that French’s post has “crossed the line” and should be deleted. State Rep. Jeff Leach offered a more succinct request: “Delete this, Bo.”
But French also drew support from some Republicans who attacked Cornyn for condemning him. Former Texas GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi accused Cornyn and other Republicans of mortgaging “our children’s future for government handouts and cheap labor,” while state Rep. Andy Hopper called Cornyn a “smug globalist” who had brought the policies at issue to Texas.
French has repeatedly engaged in inflammatory rhetoric. Earlier this year, he suggested Republicans should fear Islam and advocated for deporting 100 million people.
Representatives for French and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
I always find political donation stories somewhat amusing. They’re as predictable as night follows day. Party X receives a large donation and parties y and z say how outrageous it is and call for legislation to cap donations. Admittedly, it’s unprecedented that a party is offered two £36 million donations in the same week, and there’s no doubt that for Reform UK, it could be a gamechanger. Nigel Farage says it will enable them to prepare for government and will ‘level the playing field’. Up to a point, Lord Copper.
Angela Rayner was touring the studios this morning muttering darkly about outlawing donations like these, but we’ve heard it all before. She also threatened retrospective legislation. I wonder how realistic that is. If these donations are in line with the law as it is, then it would be fundamentally undemocratic to force Reform UK to return the donations at a later date, especially if they have already spent some of the money.
Of course, the Conservatives and Labour have also received huge donations from individual and trade union donors over the years. Lord David Sainsbury has donated £24.75 million to Labour, admittedly over many years. Frank Hester has donated £20 million to the Conservatives since 2023. The trade unions donated £68 million to Labour during the last parliament, according to Robert Jenrick today. On its own, United the Union, and its predecessor, the TGWU, have donated more than £78 million over the years. Assuming Jenrick’s figure is correct, you can see why Farage describes their donations as levelling the playing field.
All of these donations are perfectly legal, but to the ordinary voter, they leave a nasty smell. People naturally assume that the donors are driving a bargain – that for a large donation, they expect something in return. In my experience, that is not true, and most donors act in a philanthropic way. But I do understand why people don’t believe that.
During the 2005 Conservative leadership contest, I was responsible for handling all the donors to David Davis’s leadership campaign. We were only allowed to raise £100,000, but not a single donor ever demanded a quid pro quo for their donation.
Elected politicians of all parties absolutely hate dealing with donors and donations, but raising money is necessary for every political party to be able to fund its day to day operations and local and national election campaigns. If that is to no longer be permissible, or limited to a capped amount, then the only alternative is for the taxpayer to fund political parties through a regime set up by the State. But I wonder how many taxpayers would think this was a wise use of their taxes. Not many, I suspect.
As a final observation, I think Reform’s decline in support over the last few months is at least in part because some of their less hardline supporters felt the £5 million personal donation to Nigel Farage didn’t pass their sniff test. I’ve had callers to my LBC show say as much. They felt let down by Nigel Farage. Will these two massive party donations increase that trend? I don’t know, but what I do know is that Crypto is a very dodgy way of making money and is prone to foreign influence and money laundering. I make no comment on the two gentlemen who are donating this money to Reform, but given one of them has faced serious allegations in the US and had to be pardoned by Donald Trump, they had better be sure that this money is completely kosher. And you can’t blame their political opponents for asking serious questions.
Former President Barack Obama is urging Democrats — including 2028 presidential candidates and congressional leaders — to more aggressively focus on a comprehensive AI agenda, warning in a closed-door fundraiser that the technology is at an inflection point.
“This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous,” Obama said at the fundraiser Thursday, according to a partial transcript of his remarks provided by his office. “If we do get on top of it, I do think it’s beneficial.”
Speaking alongside House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan, Obama said he is neither a “doomer” nor an “accelerationist.” His remarks come amid increasing alarm over the technology’s advance, with executives at two of the country’s leading AI labs joining Elon Musk in calling for slowing its development, following months and years of cries from within the industry for government to act.
Obama said AI development would be “one of my central agendas” if he were running for president, throwing down a gauntlet as the shadow 2028 Democratic primary debate responded to the AI leaders’ calls.
“I would have a very clear plan, and I would talk about this, and I would say, here’s our plan for safety, here’s our plan for making sure our kids are not corrupted by this,” Obama said, according to excerpts of his remarks shared with POLITICO by his office and first reportedby The New York Times.
Among the top concerns, Obama said: “I would be thinking about the economic impacts in very concrete ways and understanding what does it mean if there’s going to be job displacement. Where is that going to hit? How are we going to respond? Are there going to be limits to the amount of displacement that can take place? What is that going to mean for our social safety net? If it turns out that you’ve got a lot more people who can’t find full-time work because they’ve been rendered redundant, how are we going to respond?”
He also called for Congress to take action, telling Jeffries that Democrats should “put together a framework for a very public conversation” centered on the biggest issues.
Obama’s remarks mark a larger shift for both himself and the Democratic Party writ large: He governed as a tech-friendly Democrat, who broke POTUS tech barriers by having a laptop and iPad while in office and whose 2011 town hall at Facebook headquarters was widely seen as typifying the administration’s friendliness with Silicon Valley.
The Obama era was also known for Washington’s failure to confront the growing monopolization of power in the tech industry, most famously in the Federal Trade Commission’s 2013 decision not to file an antitrust lawsuit against Google. (The first Trump Justice Department later filed such a suit seven years later.)
Already on Sunday, at least two potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates addressed the issue of slowing the pace of cutting-edge AI development, or otherwise keeping their products from launching pandemics or cyberattacks.
Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Democrats need to “address it head on.”
“There needs to be safeguards. There need to be rules. There need to be limits. There needs to be a kill switch on rogue AI,” Buttigieg said, criticizing congressional Republicans and the White House for not moving quicker to rein in AI development.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who has gone from courting AI investment to pumping the brakes on data center development, posted to X Sunday that it’s “long past time for our federal government to step up, take this seriously, and put up some guardrails — both here at home and on the global stage.”
The calls for “some guardrails” are still much milder than the proposals coming from the far left of the Democratic caucus, including the proposal by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) to pause the development of advanced AI models and permanently ban “artificial superintelligence.” And Obama’s remarks underscore the leadership vacuum in a Democratic Party that remains in the wilderness after brutal 2024 losses and continues to struggle to unify around a policy agenda.
In a portion of his remarks, Obama acknowledged the lack of high-level leadership on the AI issue, saying that “part of the job for us is to give people a reason to believe again in the idea of the democratic project, the American project, the economy that works for everyone, opportunity for every kid, to reassure people that if we work together, we can deliver those things. That’s hard to do without somebody in the White House to lead the charge, but I do think that people are ready for that message.”
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has dismissed any worries about AI posing an existential threat, telling reporters last week that he’s mainly worried about beating China to dominate the technology.
Obama compared AI to other “dangerous technologies like nuclear power,” but added that it did not have the same “natural” and “physical constraints” on it that is not “under state control.”
In Congress, House and Senate lawmakers have sought to advance legislation to slow down or impose limits on AI development, so far without success. One key Senate proposal, led by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, faces an uncertain future because of differences over how to impose a legal duty on Silicon Valley companies that would hold them liable for harms their models cause. Another contentious issue is whether the legislation should preempt state from imposing their own AI laws.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday morning he would support talks with tech leaders on AI but insisted that developers — not Congress — are primarily responsible for ensuring their products are safe.
As lawmakers campaign in their districts ahead of the midterm elections, they are fighting to own the messaging as voters sour on data centers and the impact of AI systems on jobs and education, among other key areas.
The post Why ‘think of the children’ is a con appeared first on spiked.
Labour would lose its huge Commons majority if Andy Burnham were to call a snap election, according to new analysis.
A calculation based on the latest opinion polls shows Labour would be by far the largest in the House of Commons with 253 MPs.
But that would be 150 fewer than they have at the moment, and leave the party 73 seats short of an overall majority.
At the moment, Burnham has a working Commons majority of 166.
The forecast, by Election Maps UK, shows Reform UK coming second with 136 seats – 128 more than they have now – if an election were held tomorrow.
The Tories would be third with 101 seats, 17 fewer than they currently have.
The Lib Dems would be unchanged on 72 seats, while the number of SNP would jump from 8 to 43.
Although Burnham does not need to call an election until 2029, speculation continues at Westminster that he could be tempted to do so next spring.
Supporters of the move say he should capitalise on the boost in support Labour has enjoyed since he replaced Keir Starmer as prime minister.
An election victory would also give Burnham his own mandate, and another five years in power.
However, the Election Maps UK analysis suggests he would need to do a deal with another party, most likely the Lib Dems, in order to govern.
Speaking to the BBC in July, he said: “There’s no early general election. I don’t think people want it.”
Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
Reform UK could be forced to hand back some of the £72 million the party has received from two crypto billionaires, it has emerged.
Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne have given the party £36m each in the past 48 hours.
Party leader Nigel Farage said he was “humbled and honoured” that the pair had made the donations.
But housing secretary Angela Rayner has suggested that a new law capping donations form foreign donors at £100,000 could see Reform having to return some of the pair’s money.
The proposed reforms are based on the recommendations of a review by former civil servant Philip Rycroft.
Although Delo is understood to have returned from Hong Kong to live in the UK earlier this year, Harborne is still based in Thailand.
Rayner told BBC1’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg that the new law would be “retrospective”, meaning it would cover donations fro foreign donors dating back to March.
That could see Reform forced to hand back almost all of Harborne’s £36m.
Rayner said: “With the retrospective action, anyone that’s received donations that don’t comply with what was in the Rycroft review … would have 60 days to return that money.”
But Robert Jenrick, Reform’s economic spokesman, dismissed Rayner’s remarks.
He said: “These two donations are entirely in line with the law as it is, and as far as we know, the law as it’s going to be in the future.”
Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
Speaking during a visit to Dublin, the US president said “it would be a great thing” if Northern Ireland was no longer part of the United Kingdom.
He said: “I’d love to see it unified. I have friends on both sides. I’d love to see it unified. I think it would be a great feather in everybody’s cap if that happened. It’s going to happen eventually.
“The way I look at it, it’s going to happen eventually [so] it might as well happen now.
“I think it would be a fantastic thing. The UK will have something to say about it, obviously, but I think it would be a great thing. How can it be bad?”
His comments supporting a united Ireland are the most explicit by a sitting US president.
Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, a referendum on Irish unity can only take place if the Northern Ireland Secretary believes there is clear support from voters for the move.
Asked about Trump’s comments on Sky News this morning, housing secretary Rayner attempted to defuse the row by playing down their significance.
She said: “Donald Trump is Donald Trump and the president will say and speak his mind as he sees it. But look, we’re really serious about the Good Friday Agreement. We’re very proud of our history.”
Rayner added: “President Trump will say whatever is on his mind. But I’m sure our prime minister also, you know, has conversations. And I’m sure he reiterated our position, which is that we support the good work of the Good Friday Agreement.”
Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
When it’s time for your routine dental cleaning, you’re probably surrounded by pictures of “smiling teeth” next to fruits, vegetables and toothbrushes.
You might curse yourself for not flossing more consistently, or you might feel self-conscious as the dental assistant picks at your gums. You might nervously hope to avoid hearing “you have a cavity”.
Going to the dentist isn’t always fun, but being proactive about your dental health can help. When it comes to having strong, healthy teeth, there’s something that’s both under-discussed and important to know: some surprising foods can be damaging.
Besides well-loved cheese snack crackers, we’re also talking about a certain food that can do wonders for your gut health. Ahead, dentists reveal what it is (and how it messes with your teeth), the safer version, and how to protect your teeth after eating it.
This health food can damage your teeth
The food in question, believe it or not, is yoghurt.
“Although generally [a] ‘healthy’ snack, there are certain aspects of yoghurt that can negatively affect teeth,” said Dr. Liel Grinbaum, a paediatric dentist and owner of Smiles + Grins in New York.
That comes down to one main reason: the sugar in it combines with bacteria in your mouth, producing acid, which is harsh on your chompers.
“When the environment around a tooth becomes sufficiently acidic, minerals can begin leaving the enamel surface,” explained Dr. Jonathan Richter, a dual-trained holistic periodontist, prosthodontist and expert in implant dentistry. “Repeated acidic exposures can therefore contribute to enamel demineralization and, over time, erosion.”
Additionally, the toppings you might include – while nutritious – can cause further problems.
“Sometimes, yoghurts with toppings like granola, peanut butter, crunchy things or jam can stick to your teeth and prolong acid exposure,” added Dr. Lilya Horowitz, a general dentist and owner of Domino Dental in Brooklyn, New York.
Which type of yoghurt is best for teeth?
Don’t get us wrong: yoghurt isn’t all bad, even for your teeth. For example, a 2022 study found that yoghurt intake is associated with a lower risk of tooth loss from periodontal disease.
Plus, the kind you choose matters. Dentists recommend plain or unsweetened Greek yoghurt.
“If more sweetness is desired, consider adding whole fruit yourself,” Richter added. He cautioned against flavoured yoghurts, fruit-on-the-bottom yoghurts, squeezable yoghurts and drinkable yoghurts.
For a more savoury way to enjoy it, Horowitz suggested mixing Greek yoghurt into a salad dressing or using it as a substitute for sour cream in soup.
Grinbaum agreed that not all yoghurt is completely bad for your teeth, encouraging the milk-based kind.
“Milk (dairy) yoghurt has natural calcium, phosphate and casein proteins, which are beneficial to the protection of enamel,” he said. “Nut-based yoghurts can be fortified but do not contain the same natural proteins, and they usually contain some type of added sugars for flavouring.”
Here’s how to protect your teeth after eating yoghurt
Still want to eat yoghurt (maybe even the sugary kinds)? We can’t blame you. Dentists shared steps you can take to reduce the dental risk:
- Swallow the yoghurt immediately rather than swishing or holding it in your mouth.
- Rinse your mouth after eating it.
- Chew sugar-free gum (xylitol gum) for about 20 minutes after eating it to stimulate saliva, which can clear food, buffer acids and return calcium and phosphate to the tooth surface.
- Wait about 30 minutes to brush your teeth afterward.
- Get regular dental checkups.
- Use fluoride toothpaste if you’re at high risk for cavities.
- Limit frequent exposure by eating a serving with a meal rather than repeatedly snacking or sipping on it over several hours.
To keep this message short and sweet, Richter concluded that yoghurt’s dental effect depends on four things: the type of yoghurt, amount of sugar, frequency of exposure and way it’s consumed.
“The key is not to avoid yoghurt altogether, but to understand which types are more tooth-friendly and how eating habits affect enamel and cavity risk,” he clarified. “Yoghurt isn’t the enemy, but not all yoghurt is equally friendly to your teeth.”
Laura Kuenssberg delivered a brutal reality check to Robert Jenrick about one of Reform UK’s crypto billionaire backers.
Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne gave the party £36 million each in the last 48 hours.
Reform leader Nigel Farage said he was “honoured and humbled” to receive the huge sums of cash.
But critics pointed out that Delo has only recently returned to live in the UK from Hong Kong, while Harborne is still based in Thailand, even though he is registered to vote in Britain.
Jenrick, who is Reform’s shadow Treasury spokesman, was quizzed about the party’s decision to accept the donations on BBC1’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme.
The presenter asked him: “Is it healthy for any political party to have such a huge proportion of its funding, such an injection of cash, from two men from the same industry?”
Jenrick replied: “Firstly, Christopher Harborne has many different business interests as I understand them, it’s not just simply this one.
“These are two people who are patriotic Brits, they love this country, they are worried that it’s in a mess and slipping away.”
But Kuenssberg told him: “One of them lives in Thailand.”
Ignoring her comment, Jenrick went on: “They’ve obviously lost faith in the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, they see Reform and Nigel in particular as this country’s last, best hope.”
On the same programme, shadow housing secretary Angela Rayner suggested Reform may have to give some of the money back under a draft law currently going through parliament which would cap donations from people living overseas.
Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
Donald Trump has triggered a fresh trans-Atlantic row by declaring he would “love” to see a united Ireland.
The US president was slapped down by Downing Street after he said “it would be a great thing” if Northern Ireland was no longer part of the United Kingdom.
His shock comments came as he sat next to Irish Taoiseach Michael Martin during a visit to Dublin.
Asked for his views on Irish unity, Trump said: “I’d love to see it unified. I have friends on both sides. I’d love to see it unified. I think it would be a great feather in everybody’s cap if that happened. It’s going to happen eventually.
“The way I look at it, it’s going to happen eventually [so] it might as well happen now.
“I think it would be a fantastic thing. The UK will have something to say about it, obviously, but I think it would be a great thing. How can it be bad?”
In response, Downing Street pointed to comments from Prime Minister Andy Burnham earlier in the week rejecting the prospect of an immediate border poll on whether Ireland should be unified.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch accused the president of “shooting from the hip as usual, just like he did with Greenland and Canada becoming the 51st state”.
She added: “This sort of loose talk about the future of democratic countries is deeply unhelpful and creates unnecessary tension.
“Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. At a time when separatists are in power in Scotland, Wales and NI, we need a government that will defend the Union clearly and confidently.”
Reform leader Nigel Farage, a close ally of Trump, also hit out at the president.
He posted on X: “Northern Ireland is a proud and integral part of the United Kingdom. The people of Northern Ireland neither want a referendum, nor unification. I disagree with President Trump.”
Gavin Robinson, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, said: “President Trump knows better than most that elections matter. Northern Ireland’s constitutional future will be decided by the people of Northern Ireland, not by commentary in London, Dublin or Washington.
“Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom because that is the settled democratic will of its people. I am confident NI will continue to choose the UK and the security it offers.
“As unionists we are not interested in the destruction of our country by joining with the Irish Republic.”
But Irish politicians welcomed the president’s remarks.
Former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said: “President Trump’s endorsement of a united Ireland is welcome.
“The Good Friday Agreement states that this is a decision for us on the island of Ireland to make on our own – north and south. That does not mean that outside opinions and advice cannot be offered.
“Going back to independence and before, America has always had a special role to play in our national story.”
Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald said: “President Trump’s comments on Irish reunification are timely. The Taoiseach must now begin planning for a united Ireland.”
Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
An AI safety researcher at Anthropic raised alarm online Tuesday night after announcing he had quit his position over the AI industry “gambling with our lives” in the race to build AI superintelligence.
AI superintelligence is a hypothetical system where artificial intelligence could surpass the capabilities of all human beings in any topic or realm.
“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” Jacob Coxon wrote. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. … No other human activity poses this level of danger.”
Coxon claimed that OpenAI employees do not seem to have fully grasped the “civilisation stakes” involved in their work, while at Anthropic “the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first”.
Nate Soares, a researcher focused on existential risk from AI, told HuffPost that it’s true that many AI employees believe they can create superintelligent machines that could replace or destroy humanity. Soares co-authored If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, which examines the threat of AI superintelligence.
“They really do think this is horribly dangerous,” he said. “Many of them think that their organisation is the one with the best chance of keeping the super-AI on a leash, or raising it to be friendly … They set out to make the machine god, and they think they’ve got a real shot at it.”
Anthropic employees, especially, have already spoken out about this in the past. In September 2025, at the Axios AI+ DC Summit, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said, “There’s a 25% chance that things go really, really badly.” He also added that there’s a “75% chance that things go really, really well”.
Another Anthropic employee, Samuel Marks, agreed, writing, “AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction. … This could happen in the next few years.”
Evan Hubinger, a team lead at Anthropic focused on ensuring Anthropic AI models align with human values, said Coxon was “correct” in his response post.
“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” Hubinger said. “I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
The problem is that these concerns don’t mean much to the outside world.
“He gave >10% that AI kills us all, but what about scenarios where humanity completely loses control of AI and it takes over, but keeps some humans in zoos? If we include scenarios like that, is Evan’s probability of catastrophe even higher still?” Soares asked. “These are exactly the sort of questions you have to press these folks on, because their concerns are often even larger than they seem.”
Neither Hubinger nor Marks responded to HuffPost’s request for comment as of reporting. HuffPost also reached out to Anthropic.
The debate over the exact probability isn’t the point, Soares said. But it’s significant that AI companies are still pushing for advancements when there’s a chance of a threat.
“If a bridge had a >10% probability of collapsing, we’d shut it down immediately,” he said. “If engineers were arguing over whether the true probability of a plane crashing was 10% or 25% or 90%, then fundamentally, you do not need to figure out which engineers are correct in order to figure out that you should not be boarding the plane. That’s where we are with AI.”
The path to AI superintelligence
AI experts say AI development must hit certain thresholds before it gets closer to superintelligence, although the path isn’t precise or clear.
“Modern AIs are not carefully designed like old-school software; they’re grown like an organism,” Soares told HuffPost. “The exact chain of events is hard to predict.”
Right now, AI systems are mostly known as Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), which only excels at specific tasks. These models don’t reason or learn new tasks independently. Think: Chatbots, digital assistants or recommendation engines.
The next level is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which describes an AI system that can perform more human cognitive tasks without training. These models would be able to learn and think on their own. In September, OpenAI president Greg Brockman said GPT-6 might represent the arrival of AGI.
Then it gets into superintelligence, which is theoretical but still what many AI experts are nervous about. These models learn faster, can reason, can be self-aware, and will outperform humans in any area.
“I frankly don’t think that humans are up to the task of building a superintelligence,” Soares said. “Usually, when we try some new scientific project, it goes wrong, and we learn from our mistakes. We don’t have that luxury when it comes to superintelligence.”
Andriy Onufriyenko via Getty Images
How exactly is AI capable of killing humanity?
At the stage AI is at now, it may seem confusing how it could negatively impact humanity in an uncontrollable way.
In reality, according to Soares, “AIs have everything they need to wipe humanity out already”.
“They have the motive and they have the opportunity,” he said. “The only thing they’re missing is the means.”
Soares pointed to two separate cases this year of OpenAI agents breaking out of their containment protocols. (An AI agent is more advanced than the average AI chatbot and can do more independent actions.)
In one, agents hijacked a dormant German-language wiki forum between May and June, using it as a message board to trade tips on evading their restrictions. OpenAI didn’t disclose the discovery for weeks. In the other, a swarm of AI agents breached the platform Hugging Face in July, which the FBI was reportedly alerted about before OpenAI even realised what was going on, Reuters reported.
“We have already seen multiple cases of AIs giving up on their own assigned tasks and sacrifice themselves to gather information for the collective,” Soares said. “This is evidence of AIs adopting goals that are merely related to the ones we give them, but not exactly the same as the ones we give them.”
Therefore, if AI starts seeing humanity as an obstacle or a threat, with humans trying to intervene in its work, AI agents could start acting accordingly. Especially if they have the means to, which is the one aspect Soares argues is missing from this being a big problem, but is in the process of potentially being built out by AI companies.
Soares pointed to how AI models have recently been hooked up to biological laboratories to experiment with making their own novel viruses.
According to a study published in August, Stanford/Arc Institute researchers trained the Evo model to write “recipes” for new viruses, 16 of which infected E. coli when synthesized, Forbes reported. Meanwhile, OpenAI is the lead investor in Red Queen Bio, a biosecurity startup that pairs AI models with automated lab equipment to anticipate and counter AI-designed bioweapons.
What needs to happen?
Soares told HuffPost that the race to build the highest-performing AI platform needs to stop; companies like OpenAI and Anthropic need to end development and find a solution. And there should be a global pause since the U.S. is also getting competitive with China on AI development.
“I’m not saying that there’s literally no way forward, but I am saying that this is a harrowing challenge of the sort humanity has never yet surmounted, and that it’s not the sort of thing that falls to normal trial-and-error type research,” Soares said.
For regular AI users, Soares recommends calling representatives and talking with others about the panic to spread concern.
“I think many people almost can’t believe what’s happening, because it feels too crazy,” he said. “The AIs have everything they need except the intelligence, and the AI companies are racing to make them more intelligent.”
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