Cathie Wood calls AI extinction warnings ridiculous at a Sydney briefing

Cathie Wood praised the AI industry for talking openly about its own risks and dismissed the specific risk it has been talking about, in the same set of remarks to reporters in Sydney.

Asked about the researchers who say the technology could kill everyone, she said:

Reuters reported the briefing on Tuesday, and the pledge Wood was asked about is the one Dario Amodei opened on 12 September, when he said the industry must slow down the rate at which capabilities improve, and which Sam Altman matched the same day .

Elon Musk added his support. Wood called the result positive for the development of the technology.

Her firm is unusually exposed to the three of them. ARK holds Tesla and SpaceX, Altman’s OpenAI and Amodei’s Anthropic across its public and private vehicles, so a judgement on whether the pledge is good for AI is also a judgement on four companies in her own portfolio.

Wood did not say whether it had changed how she values any of them.

Her welcome for the pledge rests on her own record rather than on the argument. Wood told the briefing she had lived through the technology and telecoms bubble that ended in a bust, and that naming a danger is most of the work of handling it.

“Half of the solution is understanding the problem,” she said.

Wood wants the extinction claim repurposed rather than argued with. Wrong on its own terms, in her account, it still points at something worth the attention:

“It gives us a great opportunity to focus the world on cybersecurity in this space”.

She did not set out what she thinks the cybersecurity risk consists of, or who she thinks should pay to close it.

Global AI stocks fell on Monday, and Asian markets struggled through Tuesday on weak sentiment towards chip and AI equities. No single cause has been established for either move, and the pledge is one of several things in front of investors this week.

We have followed the market’s patience with the sector thinning since the summer, when investors stopped taking the unlimited-demand line at face value, and again in July when the chip trade cracked .

We weighed the same 1999 comparison in April, setting the bubble parallel against what the AI companies actually earn.

What Wood adds to it is approval for the industry saying out loud that the thing might be dangerous, on the grounds that markets handle bad news better when they can see it coming.

Reuters did not report whether Wood has adjusted any ARK position since the pledge, whether she has spoken to Amodei, Altman or Musk about it, or what she makes of Anthropic’s reported plan for an October listing , which would move one of those private holdings onto a public market inside six weeks.