Simon Willison • 9/14/2026

The contagion of fear

Bryan Cantrill responds to a former Anthropic employee's claim that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade. Drawing on his own youthful mistakes that caused unjustified panic, he warns domain experts against abusing public trust with hand-wavy, fear-driven extrapolations about AI, bioweapons, and extinction. He calls for circumspection, especially when raising alarms.

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#software engineering #llm #ai