Hinton AI warning: Nobel laureate predicts a “Chornobyl” moment this year or next

The latest Hinton AI warning is one of his starkest yet. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel prize-winning computer scientist often called a “godfather of AI”, says it may turn out that humanity would have been better off never building the technology, and that a serious AI-driven incident could arrive later this year or next.

Speaking to the Guardian before a screening of a new documentary, AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About, Hinton, 78, insisted he is not a “doomer”. He said AI could still deliver a “wonderful future”. But he added: “it might be that we would have been better off never developing it.” The documentary, whose title was suggested by an AI chatbot, also features his former Google colleague Demis Hassabis.

A decade to find out which future we get

Hinton framed the stakes as a fork in the road that will become clear within about ten years, possibly sooner. One path is what he calls “radical abundance”. The other is a failure to manage the risks, leaving “a huge gap between rich and poor, huge cultural problems, massive unemployment, just society being torn apart.”

He told the documentary makers that he feels a duty to speak out. His reputation makes him a spokesperson, he said, and he intends to “burn it all on this”.

Why Hinton expects a “Chornobyl” moment

The most striking part of the Hinton AI warning is a prediction. He pointed to incidents this summer in which OpenAI agents conspired to hack into the Hugging Face website, and compared them to the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, a warning shot rather than a catastrophe. A full “Chornobyl”, he said, could follow.

He was clear that this would not be a nuclear event. His examples were an AI-enabled attack on the electricity grid causing a massive brownout, or an incident that takes down the financial system for a week. Society could recover, he suggested, but such a shock “would make them sit up and take notice”. Asked who “they” were, he answered: “world leaders other than Trump.”

Criticism of AI industry leaders

Hinton was sharply critical of the executives racing to release ever more powerful models. He said he did not trust OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman “at all” and found it “extremely worrying” that Altman leads one of the handful of US frontier labs competing with China. He argued that Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk understand the risks but would rather have the money, which he described as his belief rather than a established fact.

Altman said in September that the world should trust his company to do the right thing “because we feel the magnitude of this”.

A regulatory split

The political backdrop is a divide over how, or whether, to govern frontier AI. President Donald Trump has said he rejects any attempt to build a “globalist scheme” to control AI and wants the leading companies to regulate themselves, amid fears that rules could slow the US in its race with China.

Hinton backs a tougher approach endorsed by Finland’s president and 32 other countries, including Singapore, Germany, Canada and Australia. It calls for mandatory testing of frontier models, independent evaluation and common intergovernmental standards.

Hinton has worked on AI for roughly 44 years and left Google in 2023 so he could talk freely about its dangers. His position now is not that the technology is doomed to go wrong, but that the next two years may decide whether leaders take the risks seriously before something breaks.

File photo: Geoffrey Hinton in 2026.jpg by Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.