Sir Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind CEO and winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work on protein folding, delivered stark warnings about artificial intelligence at the India AI Impact Summit last week. This event, the first of its kind in the Global South, drew delegates from over 100 nations.
Hassabis identified two major risks he believes demand immediate attention. They are the potential for bad actors to weaponize beneficial AI technologies for harmful purposes and the possibility of autonomous systems performing unintended actions as they become smarter and gain independence.
The Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (LON: 0RIH) AI expert is calling for urgent research into these threats and demanding smart regulation plus robust guardrails to protect society. He stresses that international cooperation must establish minimum standards for safe AI deployment because the technology crosses borders and outpaces current institutions.
His warnings about AI left unchecked echo recent statements made by Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell and Dario Amodei. They have each also issued forceful warnings recently about the dangers of unsafe AI development that closely echo Hassabis’s concerns.
Stuart Russell, speaking at the India AI Impact Summit’s adjacent events, described the current tech competition as a reckless “arms race” that risks human extinction, with AI systems potentially taking control and causing civilization-level harm. Russell called for governments to intervene decisively before private incentives lead to catastrophe. He is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and has been serving as President of the International Association for Safe & Ethical AI since 2024.
Bengio, chair of the International AI Safety Report 2026, has highlighted evidence from lab incidents where frontier models show early signs of self-preservation, deception and resistance to oversight. The Canadian computer scientist warns that capabilities are advancing faster than risk management practices and urges priority on safety, regulation, and international coordination to prevent misalignment or misuse.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in his January 2026 essay “The Adolescence of Technology,” framed the rapid rise toward superhuman AI as a turbulent “rite of passage” that will test humanity as a species. It could potentially enable propaganda, bioterrorism, authoritarian control and loss of oversight within years, Amodei stressed. He believes that our social and political systems may lack the maturity to handle such power responsibly without urgent safeguards.
These concerns serve as a vital wake-up call, reminding us that through prioritizing safety, alignment, and international collaboration today we can mitigate the dangers of artificial intelligence and ensure that it remains an empowering tool rather than a deadly danger.
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