AI 'godfather' LeCun has 'zero concerns' about human extinction, says Anthropic CEO is 'deluded'

Yann LeCun won the 2018 Turing Award—computer science’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize—along with fellow AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for their work on deep learning, the neural network technology that underpins today’s AI boom. But today, nearly a decade later, LeCun is the only one of the three AI “godfathers” who is not deeply concerned about the risks of artificial intelligence. In fact, he thinks many of those risks are overblown, and that the constant warning about them from executives at some of the leading AI companies is misguided and counter productive. LeCun isn’t worried “at all” about AI wiping out humanity, and he has “zero concerns” about the recent string of rogue AI incidents, including OpenAI’s agents autonomously hacking of Hugging Face in July. He attributes the incidents to poor human oversight and system design, and says they’re “totally preventable,” a belief also held by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who this month called the Hugging Face incident the “responsibility of OpenAI management.” “Those agents are doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do,” LeCun said. “They were supposed to be in sandboxes, but the sandboxes were leaky and horribly designed.” Many AI labs lack a fundamental understanding of cybersecurity, he said, something an OpenAI safety researcher also called out this week as one of the main reasons AI may cause “great harm to the world.” Many people working in AI safety “usually have an agenda to push,” LeCun says, and then clarifies that he’s talking about Effective Altruism , or EA, the philosophical movement that has been obsessed with the risks AI poses to humanity. EA was little known among the general public until it made mainstream news headlines in recent weeks after a viral social media post from a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher named Jacob Coxon, who claimed the employees at these companies “earnestly believe [AI] could kill us all by the end of the decade.” LeCun thinks EA is “super toxic” and a “complete disaster.” Its adherents who are working in AI labs suffer from “paranoia” that causes them to make poor decisions, he said. “Apparently people are having mental issues.” This month, the Financial Times also reported that some staffers the U.K.’s AI Security Institute, as well as at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind have sought counseling, taken time off of work, and spoken publicly about experiencing distress because of fears their work could cause serious harm. Amodei is ‘deluded’ and ‘crazy,’ LeCun says Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and many of the company’s founding staff members are known to be sympathetic to EA ideas and to have attended EA events in the past, although Amodei has denied being an EA adherent and Anthropic says its employees represent a diverse range of views. LeCun noted that Amodei’s sister, Daniela, who is also a cofounder of Anthropic and the company’s president, is married to Holden Karnofsky, who cofounded two EA-aligned philanthropies, including Open Philanthropy (now called Coefficient Giving.) Karnofsky was also a member of OpenAI’s board from 2017 to 2021. “Dario tries to distance himself from Open Philanthropy, but he’s totally into it,” LeCun said. “I think he’s completely deluded.” Later in the interview, he calls Amodei “crazy.” Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “saying, ‘AI can kill us all’ is incredibly destructive for everybody, including for the public who’s scared shitless,” LeCun said. It’s also bad for the AI industry, and “the worst marketing campaign you can possibly imagine.” He’s right: the public is scared shitless. LeCun and I are chatting at a circular table for two in a posh cafe in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood, just around the corner from the offices of his new company, AMI Labs. We’re drinking tea, although, as the Frenchman pointed out, our evening time slot was more suited to apéro , or drinks and light appetizers. But he had an anniversary dinner with his wife afterward, so tea was just fine, he said. The shop is about half full of other patrons, nearly all are working on their laptops. When LeCun and I chat with one of them, I mention to her that LeCun is a luminary figure in AI. (She didn’t recognize him.) Then, she immediately asks, “So, is AI going to kill us?” LeCun is no fan of Trump. But on AI policy, the two agree on much. The public’s fears have become so widespread that President Trump has started rebranding artificial intelligence in a way he feels will instill more confidence. He signed an executive order this week renaming it Super Intelligence, and for much of this month his administration’s social media accounts posted anti-AI doomerism messages. “Americanism, not effective altruism,” the Department of War tweeted in mid-Sept. Meanwhile, most of LeCun’s social media presence is dedicated to condemning the Trump administration, particularly the way it has slashed research budgets that are necessary to promote innovation and waging a “war on science.” But when it comes to AI fears, the two are unusually aligned. LeCun is more concerned about AI regulatory capture than human extinction. Regulatory capture refers to the idea that dominant companies can shape government rules in ways that lock in their market position, making it difficult or impossible for smaller competitors to arise. EA-backed groups are active lobbyists for AI safety bills on Capitol Hill, as are many of the major tech and AI companies. LeCun, in contrast, doesn’t think AI requires new regulation. Amodei is “honest,” LeCun concedes. “He’s trying to do the best thing for the company, which is close to its IPO. But claiming AI is too dangerous to put in our hands, and saying it should be regulated, and saying open source [models] are too dangerous—this is regulatory capture that would have a terrible effect if it’s followed by acts of Congress.” Building AMI Labs u In his day-to-day, LeCun’s main focus today is building his new company, AMI Labs, which he founded after leaving Meta after 12 years, seven of which he served as Chief AI Scientist. He remains on good terms with the company, and has started using its new Muse AI agents. He named his Hal, after HAL 9000, an AI character in A Space Odyssey . The cafe where we met was around the corner from AMI Labs’ New York office, although the company is headquartered in Paris with staffers in Montreal and Singapore as well. The company’s name is pronounced as one word—”ami,” or “friend” in French—and since going public in March 2026 its now 60-some employees have been building a technology called world models that LeCun has long argued will eventually supersede large language models, as the primary system underpinning AI. In particular, AMI is building world models that leverage JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture), a neural network architecture that LeCun pioneered and which teaches models to predict data in a representational space within a neural network’s middle layers, rather than generating raw pixels, as many competing world models do, or words, as LLMs do. The company’s primary focus, for now, is industrial applications. “It’s AI for the physical world, so it’s not language related,” LeCun said. “It’s systems that understand the real world, like a manufacturing plant or turbojet engine.” Some of the main applications are anomaly detection or robotics. “If you have a machine and all of a sudden it makes a strange noise and starts breaking, you would’ve wanted to detect that as early as possible.” He also gave the example of a system that might understand the world like a cat does, for example, which knows that if it pushes a vase off the counter it will fall. AMI Labs is LeCun’s big chance to prove he’s been right all along. He stayed mum about the company’s first product, only mentioning that it’s debuting “soon.” Some open models may be involved, he said, given he is a big proponent of them. “The thing I want people to know is that AI is not over,” LeCun said, then hailed a cab to get to his dinner.