Elon Musk warns that artificial intelligence could outstrip humanity’s combined intelligence within about five years — and that people may lose meaningful control over the technology inside a decade.
Speaking Thursday with The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, the xAI founder said AI is on a trajectory to outperform humans “at nearly every intellectual task.” “There really won't be anything that AI can't do better than humans, apart from being human, perhaps,” Musk said. He painted a paradoxical picture: “The most likely outcome is an age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they can think of,” he added, noting that while that possibility may sound “preposterous,” 2026 is already here and we should watch where things stand by 2036.
Musk reiterated long-standing concerns that advanced AI poses existential risks, but said he no longer sees a realistic way to slow its development. “I can't see any way to really stop this incredible momentum of AI and robots,” he told Beddoes. At the same time, he admitted there may be reasons not to press a hypothetical “stop button” if widespread abundance is the likely result.
Instead of halting progress, Musk proposed cooperative measures focused on safety:
- Regular safety and security meetings among the world’s leading AI companies.
- Limited, early cross-access to frontier models so rival labs can identify dangerous capabilities before public release.
- If companies fail to mitigate serious risks, governments could step in.
Musk also used the conversation to criticize OpenAI’s leadership and its evolution from a nonprofit to a for-profit enterprise. “Well, I'm not a fan of Sam Altman because you started a nonprofit that was meant to be an open-source AI company, owned by the world, and it somehow got turned into an $800 billion for-profit company with closed source,” he said.
That dispute played out in court earlier this year: in May, a California jury rejected Musk’s $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, finding the defendants not liable for abandoning the nonprofit mission. The verdict ended one of Musk’s most high-profile legal battles with the ChatGPT developer.
On Anthropic, Musk struck a different tone. He suggested Anthropic sprang from a lack of trust in OpenAI’s leadership: co-founder Dario Amodei and his team “otherwise would have remained at OpenAI,” Musk argued. He praised Amodei as “very principled” and said “everyone I've met at Anthropic so far has been well-intentioned. No one has set off my evil detector.” Still, he acknowledged outside critics, including Sam Altman, who accuse Anthropic of using fear-based messaging to market its Claude models. Despite personal and corporate tensions, Musk urged collaboration: “At the end of the day, if we have to talk, we'll talk. Set aside our personal differences for the good of the world.”
Why this matters for the crypto community
- Decentralization vs. centralization: Musk’s call for coordination among major AI labs highlights the tension between centralized control for safety and decentralized principles prized by many in crypto and Web3.
- Token economics and markets: An “age of abundance” could reshape value creation models, impacting everything from token utility to labor markets that underpin many blockchain projects.
- Governance models: The idea of labs voluntarily sharing early model access — and governments stepping in only if companies fail to act — raises questions about transparency, auditability and whether decentralized governance could offer alternative safety frameworks.
Bottom line: Musk sees AI heading toward capabilities that could eclipse human expertise within years, with potentially transformative economic upside and existential risk on the table. He’s pushing for pragmatic industry-level safety measures, even as his long-running feud with OpenAI’s leadership continues to play out publicly.
Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
