Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below. ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood called warnings that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity "ridiculous," while welcoming the industry's push to slow advances at the AI frontier so safety measures can catch up. Wood also expects President Donald Trump to block new federal rules.
Polymarket traders currently give a qualifying U.S. AI safety law just a 19% chance of being enacted before 2027, on about $114,000 in trading. Wood called the industry's slowdown pledge a "positive step." Drawing on her experience investing through the tech and telecom bubble, she said she welcomed industry leaders publicly confronting AI's risks.
"Half of the solution is understanding the problem," Wood told . But she rejected Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger's estimate that there is a greater than 10% chance AI wipes out humanity within the next decade. "That's ridiculous," Wood said, without elaborating on the extinction estimate itself.
She instead argued that AI safety fears could sharpen the industry's focus on cybersecurity. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called over the weekend for frontier labs to slow the rate of capability gains, warning that safety testing may struggle to keep pace. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk backed the push.
The warnings hit chip stocks Monday. Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) fell 3.4%, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped 5.9%. CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD), meanwhile, jumped 13.8%.
Wood argues the safety scare could actually increase AI demand because companies may need advanced models to find and repair software vulnerabilities. "So it is actually increasing the demand for the models. I think the publicity has been good," Wood told Forbes Australia.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
