But that’s exactly how it played out when US tech giant Anthropic’s Mythos 5 AI model went rogue. Bengio is particularly spooked by recent experiments showing AI choosing self-preservation over human life when given a choice. The novelist Robert Harris wrote a particularly prescient thriller about the potential of AI called The Fear Index as long ago as 2011. One group of people which appears to have no scruples about the pell-mell race for ever-smarter AI is the tech giants. Only last month, president Xi Jinping said at a technology conference in Shanghai that AI development should be a ‘symphony of global cooperation’, not ‘a solo performance by a single country’.