Michael Sauers

October 26, 2025

The existential threat of AI is extinction. This is a rising sentiment that is pushing other concerns such as fake news, polarization, threats to democracy, deep fake harassment, scams, bias, discrimination, job loss, economic inequality, mental health, addiction and loss of privacy, power accumulation, tyranny, computer viruses and cyber attacks to the sidelines. Many prominent people who are woven throughout the AI movement are raising red flags.

A Netherland’s citizen group, Pause AI, lays out the risks in layman’s terms and its website posts a letter signed by leaders in the field. This includes people like Stuart Russell, Yoshua Bengio, Stephen Hawking, Geoffrey Hinton and Eliezer Yudkowsky. All are renowned in the field. Even leaders and investors in AI companies such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Meindertsma are voicing concerns about rapid development. Investigative journalists Karen Hao, Cade Metz and Zvi Mowshowitzan are reporting concerns within the movement as expressed by researchers Roman Yampolskiy, Daniel Kokotajlo and Dan Hendrycks.

All are calling for a temporary pause in AI development until safeguards, guidelines and, yes, those evil regulations which can ensure humanity’s safety are put in place. That sounds like reasonable common sense and it is supported by 70% of the American public.

More research is necessary by all of us.