Overview
- Maher, in Friday's Real Time monologue, said it was time to "shut the whole thing down" until the risks are understood.
- He targeted a small circle of executives, naming Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Dario Amodei as outsized gatekeepers of the technology.
- He highlighted Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, described by the company as more capable than prior models and limited to roughly 40 large firms including Google, Apple, and JPMorgan.
- He warned that Mythos was trained to find software flaws and could also enable hacking, raising concerns about access to tools that could threaten banks, hospitals, and power grids.
- He cited past alarms from Musk, Altman, and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton’s 10%–20% extinction-risk estimate, and he argued that AI lacks conscience as he referenced studies and reports of war-game escalations and chatbot-linked self-harm.