Exactly how could AI kill humans?

It’s not an outlier estimate on the Hill anymore. An Anthropic researcher who resigned this month put it more starkly, warning that the people building the technology “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”Trump had already dismissed the premise days earlier. Across a string of Truth Social posts that Monday, he called AI fears a “hoax,” dubbed himself the “Hoax Buster,” and mocked the idea of robots marching into American cities. He returned to the subject five days later, announcing he would form an “AI Force” and appoint an AI czar to accelerate American dominance in the technology rather than restrain it.House Speaker Mike Johnson echoed him the next day in even more candid terms.“What the president is saying is, you’re not all going to be dead in 10 years,” he stated. “That’s a hoax.”That collision, a 78-year-old scientist warning of civilizational risk and a sitting president calling the same warning a partisan fiction, is the real story of the AI safety debate, and it is already hardening into a national security question in its own right.Sens. Ted Cruz, Amy Klobuchar and John Thune are drafting bipartisan legislation aimed specifically at “catastr...