Al's doomsday hype highlights the dark art of marketing

Artificial intelligence companies are using fear as the ultimate sales pitch.

- Parmy Olson

Since the beginning of the boom in generative artificial intelligence, technology leaders have talked up the dangers of the very systems they’re trying to sell. It’s a paradoxical marketing strategy and, unfortunately for some of the industries and companies deemed most vulnerable to disruption, it’s worked brilliantly. Fear, it turns out, is the ultimate sales pitch.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman used to say the technology behind ChatGPT could threaten human civilisation itself: “We face existential risk,” he said in 2023. That flavour of doom mongering has become passe, judging by the new boogeymen Mr Altman and his peers have been pointing to lately: Al as a job killer and a threat to cybersecurity.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in January that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years, destabilising economies and society. Now his company has cautioned that its forthcoming Mythos model can find flaws in an array of software programs, operating systems and browsers.

Anthropic says the model is too dangerous to disseminate and that only a few pre-vetted companies, including Apple and Amazon, can access it.

The company’s evidence is unsettling. Mythos managed to find so-called zero-day vulnerabilities — previously unknown bugs that allow software vendors zero days to fix them - in several operating systems for servers and computers, potentially allowing someone to shut down systems or control them. In the hands of bad actors, that could cause havoc.