Worried AI Will Kill Everyone? A Former FTC Commissioner Says Ignore the Doomers

A former US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner has dismissed the wave of artificial intelligence (AI) doom warnings coming out of the biggest labs. 

Alvaro Bedoya served on the commission from 2022 until his disputed removal in 2025. His post lands in the middle of a public argument over how fast AI should move.

Humanity Has Survived Worse

Bedoya lists what humans have already lived through.

“AI will not eradicate humanity. Humans survived an ice age, the Black Death, two world wars, and (so far) the advent of nuclear weapons. Anyone who is loudly warning of AI-caused human extinction should not be taken seriously,” he said. 

He rejects the idea that he is an AI booster or that the technology is harmless. His target is the use of AI extinction language. Bedoya calls it a strawman deployed to justify a cartel of billionaire AI companies.

He offered a test for sincerity. Anyone who truly believed the product might kill everyone would halt operations and call the police.

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A 2014 Memo Already Answered This 

Anthropic chief Dario Amodei asked Washington for a narrow antitrust waiver so labs could hold safety talks. It sits inside the second of three steps in the pacing plan Sam Altman endorsed last week. Elon Musk backed the idea, too.

Bedoya says they never had to ask. He points to a joint policy statement the Justice Department and the FTC issued on April 10, 2014. It said antitrust is not, and should not be, a roadblock to legitimate cybersecurity information sharing.

“I am, rather, explaining that the companies have, right now and yesterday, the ability to coordinate to stop any safety and health risks. Antitrust is no barrier to that,” Bedoya wrote on X

Safety coordination is legal, he explained. Coordination that locks cheaper rivals out of the market is not.

He tied that risk to the economics. The biggest labs are burning cash without reaching profitability. Open weight models undercut them on price. 

“The panic of individual employees may be sincere if misguided, but the moves by their CEOs to achieve some kind of broad antitrust waiver or exemption should be meet with deep skepticism in light of the economics of the industry and the threat they face from open models,” he added.

Altman has reached a similar conclusion from the other side. In a longer post on X, he said OpenAI does not believe it needs to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation to start the work.

He still wants a federal framework setting consistent safety requirements for frontier labs. Where government help is needed, he said, is international coordination.

That skepticism runs against a week of warnings from inside the labs themselves. The debate traces back to September 9, when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit. Lawmakers started advocating for a ban on superintelligence. Bridgewater investment chief Greg Jensen has also warned that nothing changes until AI kills someone.

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