A former Google DeepMind safety researcher explains the frightening difference between AI and other threats like nuclear war and asteroids

KATERYNA KON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images Geoffrey Hinton says a 10% chance AI causes human extinction is not an 'unreasonable' belief.

Ramana Kumar explains what distinguishes superintelligent AI from other modern threats like war.

The issue, he said, is that AI's capabilities are advancing faster than humans can control.

Climate change can't anticipate our next move.

An asteroid can't dodge us.

And while humans can be adversaries in a nuclear war, the fallout that follows isn't trying to outsmart anyone.

For Business Insider's video series " AI Architects ," Ramana Kumar told Business Insider in May 2025 that superintelligent AI could be different.

We reconnected with him on Thursday as fresh warnings about AI risk drew new attention to that conversation.

Kumar said he does not see AI risk as replacing concerns about climate change, nuclear war, or other catastrophes.

Instead, he sees them as related problems: What can happen when power becomes too concentrated, and societies fail to coordinate enough to keep it in check.

Superintelligent AI, he added, could be an extreme version of that broader danger.

Kumar, who spent about five years as a research scientist on Google DeepMind 's technical AGI safety team, said what distinguishes a powerful adversarial AI is that it could anticipate what humans were doing and work against attempts to stop it.

KATERYNA KON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images That possibility is back in the spotlight after an Anthropic employee quit this week, warning on X that the technology could "kill us all." In response, Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist known as the "Godfather of AI, told BBC Newsnight on Wednesday that a 10% chance of AI wiping out humanity within a decade was "not an unreasonable estimate." He also stressed that nobody knows how to make a reliable prediction.

Kumar's warning helps explain what could make that hypothetical threat so difficult to contain: Humans wouldn't simply be trying to stop something dangerous.