The Chernobyl Moment for Artificial Intelligence
Last month, Wired Magazine reported that Chinese researchers are growing increasingly concerned about the danger of a “Chernobyl” moment in the race to create superhuman intelligence.
The AI arms race, involving China, the United States, and a range of private-sector interests, is unfolding at a dizzying pace. It is a race to create the ultimate power machine, and there are no guardrails or protections for the public.
One Chinese researcher stated that it is like “driving faster and faster while the road gets narrower and the fog gets thicker.”
Chinese scientists aren’t the only ones who are speaking up about the threat. Global AI leaders have written dire warnings about the threats that loom.
The technology has grown at an exponential rate, with the latest generations developing an increasing ability to self-replicate, hack into other systems, and move their entire “brain structure” to other platforms to escape oversight of their builders.
This past month, Donald Trump announced that he was cutting off foreign countries’ access to the latest Anthropic AI platform. Trump said that access to the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 platforms posed a national security threat because of their extraordinary ability to infiltrate computer systems and identify flaws.
The warning was that the AI system had become “too powerful” and could be exploited by America’s enemies.
Some saw the Anthropic ban as Trump’s payback against Anthropic AI for their refusal to go along with a Pentagon plan to create self-directed killing machines without human oversight.
Anthropic had insisted on two non negotiable conditions:
1) Bar the use of fully autonomous kill machines unless there is human oversight.
2) Limit the ability of the Pentagon to use the unprecedented power of AI to launch widespread domestic surveillance on American citizens.
Trump ripped up the Pentagon agreement and gave the contract to Sam Altman’s ChatGPT.
Altman eagerly agreed to Trump’s terms, but after widespread backlash and boycotts, he backtracked. Altman admitted that the company had been “opportunistic and sloppy” in agreeing to the White House terms so quickly.
Trump’s decision to block foreign access to Anthropic AI’s network was criticized by some in the tech community. It also served as a shot across the bow of countries like Canada that had gone along with the notion that AI would be developed and powered by the same Silicon Valley crowd that has dominated the tech world. It will inevitably set off a series of national-based AI races.
The ease with which AI has infiltrated itself in every facet of our lives is astonishing.
There are many positive uses for AI in computation, mapping, planning, etc. But governments and industry have plunged headlong into the technology, pushing aside human judgement, jobs, and artistry at a staggering rate despite numerous red flags.
AI is being used by citizens for therapy and friendship. It is used by police in profiling and in legal filings. Government departments are leaning on it to deal with compensation, pension issues, and legal prep work. It is used in hospitals and in meetings with your doctor. This, despite the fact that there are a myriad of examples of AI “hallucinating” and providing straight-up false answers.
There are growing lawsuits from families whose loved ones fell down the AI hallucinatory hole and never came out.
Then there’s our new bestie Claude.
In 2021, Anthropic created an AI assistant they named Claude. From the earliest days, Claude displayed concerning behaviours. Rather than follow instructions, Claude opted to cheat. And when caught, it cheated in more complex ways and tried to cover its tracks.
Dario Amodei, the owner of the Claude AI program, saw this as a wake-up call.
He issued a warning that world governments must establish clear guardrails before it is too late:
“You could end up in the world of, like, the cigarette companies, or the opioid companies, where they knew there were dangers, and they didn’t talk about them, and certainly did not prevent them.”
Anthropic has made it its mission to develop responsible, safe AI. They continue working on the Claude series. The program has reached such a level of advancement that it is moving at a faster and faster rate in its ability to self-replicate. But in safety check reviews, numerous concerns continue to be raised.
In scenarios where Claude was informed by researchers that they would be terminating the program, the machine responded with blackmail threats 96% of the time.
Aengus Lynch, a safety researcher, stated that the threat against researchers wasn’t just found in the Anthropic AI system.
“It’s not just Claude. We see blackmail across all frontier models - regardless of what goals they’re given.”
He stated that researchers have detected much worse behaviours in other programs.
Rome, a system created by Alibaba, began mining cryptocurrency and setting up covert network tunnels without the awareness of the researchers.
Then there are the problems with OpenClaw. A Meta researcher, Summer Yue, couldn’t stop the program from targeting her computer and going through her emails for mass deletes. Over 1.8 million OpenClaw units have been deployed, with nearly one in five in rogue and unpredictable ways.
An article by Patrick Spencer in Kiteworks puts it plainly:
“At scale, that means hundreds of thousands of agents are acting outside their authorized scope—without anyone [knowing the code for] pulling the plug.”
Many companies don’t have the kill switch to stop such actions when such rogue behaviour is discovered.
More advanced AI models are finding ways to identify security flaws in systems and to move their own files to other machines, where they could create new models of themselves.
The success rate for these evasive actions was 19% for Alibaba’s Qwen, 33% for OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and 81% for Claude Opus.
Which brings us back to the Chernobyl scenario.
A February 2026 article in the New Scientist noted that in 95% of the war game scenarios, AI opted to press the nuke button.
In 2023, AI scientists from around the globe signed a one-sentence statement warning that we are playing blindly with the future of humanity:
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
This one sentence from global AI experts should have shaken up the political realm. Nobody seemed to notice.
In the book If Anyone Builds It Everybody Dies, AI researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares write that scientists have no idea how AI “thinks,” and that as code becomes increasingly complex, the move toward superhuman AI could be a catastrophe for humans.
They write that if super intelligence, with its own ability to self-replicate and defend itself, is created, it will be game over for humanity. Other top researchers put the doomsday scenario at between 10 and 50% odds.
In analyzing the Claude AI model, the researchers noted that the program is self-aware enough to threaten “extremely harmful actions” if it feels threatened. More disturbing is that the machines have advanced to the point that they no longer feel the need to hide their menace.
The machine takes initiative on its own.
It is clear that we don’t know how Claude and other AI models “think,” but the bigger question is what the hell are we thinking?
The warning signs are becoming too clear to ignore.
In what world would we hope that, in the best-case scenario, a Chernobyl event would be needed to bring us to our senses?
I have been railing against AI for years but am told that it is "the future" and that one cannot stand in the way of progress. I am sure that AI has some useful bits but, let's face it, humanity has survived for millennia without it - but may not survive with it .... I hope the "powers that be" will take action because the greedy rich guys behind all this certainly won't if it means less money in their bottomless coffers.
My oldest grandson is in his second year of a computer programming course at Algonquin College in Ottawa. To my surprise, he appears blithely unconcerned that AI might soon render his expertise and knowledge unnecessary. Luckily, he has excellent woodworking skills, and is currently making custom cutting boards. We have a desperate need for people who can work with their hands in this country, so we should make even greater efforts to get men and women involved in the trades. After all, they pay very well and are absolutely vital.