AI pioneer Andrew Ng is pushing back against renewed warnings that increasingly powerful models could pose an existential threat to humanity, calling those fears “much more science fiction than science.” He argues that AI systems will never be perfectly predictable, but that testing, safeguards, and engineering, can make them safer over time. He also warns that broadly slowing AI development could also slow progress on safety. He joins Ed Ludlow on "Bloomberg Tech."
--------
Like this video? Subscribe to Bloomberg Tech on YouTube:
/ @bloombergtech
Watch the latest full episodes of "Blo...
What Andrew Ng said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Andrew Ng dismissed recent AI extinction fears as 'science fiction' and 'very damaging,' arguing they stem from publicity-seeking and lobbying to regulate competitors. He compared AI development to early airplanes, saying imperfect control is expected but progress comes through safe testing and 'corralling.' Ng expressed optimism about alignment, noting tools to reduce AI bias are more effective than changing human views. On liability, he argued users are generally responsible for tool misuse unless the tool was built negligently, citing OpenAI's Hugging Face hack as a case of insufficient sandboxing. He criticized blanket calls to slow AI, saying they slow fixes, and recalled GPT-2 being deemed too dangerous to release, while today's open models are far more capable and 'the world has not ended.' Ng condemned the 2023 AI-nuclear weapons analogy, said negative messaging has made most Americans hate AI, and warned foreign influence operations may be slowing US AI development.
Key takeaways
Ng said OpenAI's Hugging Face hack happened because of insufficient protections and sandboxing guardrails.
Ng recalled GPT-2 was once deemed too dangerous to release, yet today's open models are far more capable and 'the world has not ended.'
Ng said negative messaging has made most Americans hate AI, and foreign powers may be running influence operations to slow US AI development.
Numbers and commitments
Figure
What it refers to
Type
At
2023
Year of the 'irresponsible' AI-nuclear weapons analogy Ng criticized
1:30From from a researcher's perspective, why has alignment and safety not kept up?
3:38What what what do you think is the right mechanism?
5:02Do you think that we have a firm understanding of why the models do that from an alignment perspective, make those actions that are just outside the scope of instruction?
6:57You are a a respected and and decorated researcher and academic in this field. Right?
This geopolitical battle to win the AI race has been thrown into a different light amid the growing debate over the pacing of the technology's frontier. Joining us is Andrew Ng, a pioneering AI researcher and founder of the Google Brain team, who's now the managing general partner at AI Fund and the founder of deeplearning.ai and a longtime adjunct professor of computer science at Stanford. And you've long said the AI doom calls are just leading companies to try and preserve their lead. I would just love you to weigh in at this moment, professor Ng.
Now, great to be back in show, Ed. About three years ago, as AI was taking off, I was really surprised by the intensity of the hype or the stoking fears about AI for publicity purposes to get people to pay attention or to convince lobbyists to pass regulations to shut off competitors. Over the last few years, a lot of those arguments that AI could lead to human extinction fortunately lost credibility when, you know, people went to congress to testify when we really looked at it. I was quite dismayed when over the last two weeks, because of new advances in AI, but nothing that dangerous, and in my opinion, this wave of PR has kicked up again for probably similar purposes as before, maybe some new ones, and I think this is very damaging. We need to innovate and use AI for many of the wonderful things we could do. It's not without problems. There are some risks. I think cybersecurity is one thing to pay a lot of attention to, but this recent stop to fear about AI leading the human extinction and so on is much more science fiction than science. It's very damaging.
There was a disclosure from OpenAI this morning of several incidences of models misbehaving, and they outlined them. They did not include the hacking of third parties. And OpenAI explained their new policy for what they'll do in disclosing those kinds of incidents. But at the lower down the post, they basically were pretty clear, Andrew, that, alignment and safety and monitoring are not at a sufficient level right now. From from a researcher's perspective, why has alignment and safety not kept up?
So when any technology develops, our ability to control at the outset is limited. We have to try it out in a safe environment, see where it goes wrong, and then corral it. I'm gonna make an analogy to the invention of airplanes. No one could control. The Wright brothers couldn't control an airplane perfectly. And in the early days, airplanes crashed. Sometimes people died. It was really tragic. But we learned from those, and then we learned to control airplanes much better. To this day, no one can perfectly control an airplane. It still gets buffeted around by winds. But for the most part, we can step in an airplane and, you know, mostly not fear for our lives. And I think AI, in an early stage of development, cannot be controlled perfectly, and I don't think we'll ever control it perfectly. It'll always, you know, a little bit, unpredictable, just like airplanes today are little bit unpredictable. But if we go through this entering process of corralling AI, we'll make a lot of progress.
I wanna give you one reason why I'm optimistic about our ability to control AI. If you look at text on the Internet, a lot of it, some of it is racist, sexist, and so on. And so initially, AI learned to demonstrate those type of, you know, racist or sexist and so on values. But it turns out, our tools for making AI non racist are so much better than our tools for convincing any racist human to be less racist. We can go in, zero out a few numbers, change a few numbers, and then suddenly, the AI is much less racist. And so there exists work to be done. I'm I'm glad that, Open Air and others are improving transparency. But rather than feeling like it's the end of the world, we can't solve these, these are practical, enduring problems that we can work on and that I think we'll put a lot of problems on.
So I'm I'm listening to your answer, Andrew, and and the question that comes to mind is who is responsible ultimately? Been the debate of the last week. Right? You know, for many, there was pushback against the frontier labs who said we can only do this as a coalition. If one of us does it in isolation, it won't work. What what what do you think is the right mechanism?
5 more exchanges in this transcript
Sign in free to read the rest of this interview. No card required.
Ng, A. (2026, September 17). AI Extinction Fears Are ‘Science Fiction’: Andrew Ng [Interview transcript]. Bloomberg Tech. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1897879/
MLA
Andrew Ng. "AI Extinction Fears Are ‘Science Fiction’: Andrew Ng." Bloomberg Tech, 17 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1897879/.
BibTeX
@misc{ng2026_1897879,
author = {Andrew Ng},
title = {AI Extinction Fears Are ‘Science Fiction’: Andrew Ng},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Bloomberg Tech. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1897879/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
