ClaimsSteven Pinker

“they’re the ones that are both predicting the doom of humanity and working the hardest to accelerate the technologies that they think will wipe us out.”

Steven Pinker, interviewee 7 October 2026 Steven Pinker on AI Doom and Consciousness (Conspicuous Cognition) archived copy

Factual AI policy and governance

The founders of OpenAI (described as x-risk alumni) and of Anthropic (described as breakaways from OpenAI) are both predicting the doom of humanity and working hardest to accelerate the technologies they think will wipe us out.

Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.

Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

The second judge would not resolve this claim; the verdict shown is the first judge's.

What would count as true or false

Judge as of 7 October 2026. This claim has two parts: (a) the founders or leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic have publicly said that advanced AI could wipe out or catastrophically harm humanity; (b) these same companies are among the leading developers pushing frontier AI capabilities forward. True: both parts are documented by public statements (for example the 2023 CAIS extinction-risk statement and executives' interviews and essays) and by the companies' positions at the frontier. Mostly true: both parts hold, but 'predicting doom' overstates leaders who give only a probability of catastrophe while saying they expect good outcomes, or 'working the hardest' overstates their rank among developers. Mixed: only one part is supported, or only one of the two companies fits. Mostly false: the leaders have made only vague mentions of risk with no claim of existential danger, or the companies are not leading developers. False: the leaders have rejected existential-risk views, and the companies are not advancing frontier AI.

Set before the research began.

Evidence (4)

  1. E1 Can superintelligence ever be controlled? Sam Altman on AI safety, doomsday scenarios, and OpenAI's delayed IPO | Fortune Fortune · 5 October 2026

    “A 10% risk of AI killing us all by the end of the decade is unacceptable, Altman flatly tells me. No one should be taking those kinds of risks.”

  2. E2 AI Extinction Statement Press Release | CAIS Center for AI Safety · 30 May 2023

    “Distinguished AI scientists, including Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and leaders of the major AI labs, including Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, have signed a single-sentence statement from the Center for AI Safety that reads:”

  3. E3 Is the “good” AI company actually making everything worse? Vox (Future Perfect) · 27 October 2026

    “Anthropic filed for a blockbuster initial public offering on Monday, chasing a valuation of $2 trillion even as it warns in the IPO filing that AI could “pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.””

  4. E4 Dario Amodei — The Adolescence of Technology darioamodei.com (Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO) · 4 June 2024

    “Here, I mean “doomerism” not just in the sense of believing doom is inevitable (which is both a false and self-fulfilling belief), but more generally, thinking about AI risks in a quasi-religious way.”

Reasoning

The evidence supports part (a): Altman signed the CAIS extinction statement [E2] and called a 10% risk unacceptable [E1], and Anthropic's IPO filing warns of existential risk [E3]. No evidence item shows that OpenAI or Anthropic are leading developers pushing frontier AI capabilities, so part (b) is not settled; E3 reports only an IPO and a valuation target.

Cite this claim

Steven Pinker, “The founders of OpenAI (described as x-risk alumni) and of Anthropic (described as breakaways from OpenAI) are both predicting the doom of humanity and working hardest to accelerate the technologies they think will wipe us out.” (said 7 October 2026). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_0b453f5d699d, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_0b453f5d699d

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

Reply to this claim

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More factual claims by Steven Pinker

  1. Mostly true Factual 24 September 2025
    “Of course it is, but the official policy of the United States is that it doesn’t exist, and of pretty much every other country, as far as I know.”

    Asked whether Taiwan is a sovereign state, Pinker said the official policy of the United States, and as far as he knows of pretty much every other country, is that Taiwan as a sovereign state does not exist.

  2. Mostly true Factual 11 October 2026
    “A major fact about language, known for decades, is that people don’t blurt out what they mean”

    It has been known for decades in the study of language that people do not blurt out what they mean but use euphemism, innuendo and indirection.

  3. Mostly true Factual 11 October 2026
    “But in other kinds violence, such as homicides, the progress has definitely continued.”

    Progress against homicide has definitely continued, with homicide rates for most countries and for the world as a whole better now than 15 years ago.

  4. Mostly true Factual 11 October 2026
    “I float a number of hypotheses as to why cooperation and human flourishing in general have increased.”

    Pinker said he floats a number of hypotheses as to why cooperation and human flourishing in general have increased.

  5. Mostly true Factual 11 October 2026
    “Those were as old as civilisation.”

    Slavery and imperialism were as old as civilisation, predating the Enlightenment.

All of them

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