For years, artificial intelligence researchers have warned of ways the technology could wipe out humanity : AI bots could design an unstoppable disease, unleash a nuclear war, or transform all of Earth into paper clip factories, as one thought experiment goes. Debates inside the AI industry and beyond over the plausibility of these doomsday scenarios have heated up since several executives endorsed slowing the technology’s development for safety reasons. Despite warnings of the potential for humans to lose their grip on the technology , some suspect the worst-case scenarios described by the AI companies themselves have more to do with validating the importance of their work than reality. “These arguments just don’t really hold water. I think they’re sci-fi and they’re enticing to a certain childish style of thinking and it’s very tempting for the frontier labs because it helps them recruit certain types of folks,” said Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade, a researcher at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne and a member of OpenAI’s Frontier Risk Council. Still, more people are beginning to worry about the risks of the technology that has dazzled the world with its astounding capabilities. Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic researcher who resigned from the company over concerns that it and its competitors are not acting responsibly in AI development, said on X recently that he needs to “work on” communicating to people more effectively exactly how AI would end humanity. “Unfortunately it is very difficult to convey specific scenarios,” he wrote earlier this month. Here are some of the more widely discussed doomsday scenarios.