You Won't See AI Regulated Until It Kills Someone, Warns Bridgewater's CIO

Bridgewater managing chief investment officer Greg Jensen says nothing will be done about artificial intelligence (AI) until it starts killing people. He wants the problem dealt with well before that point.

His warning arrives during a week of escalating safety warnings from researchers at the largest AI labs.

Bridgewater CIO Issues AI Warning and Points to February 2020

Jensen was one of the earliest backers of OpenAI and Anthropic. He made the case on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast. The executive compared the mood around AI now to the weeks before COVID-19 reached American shores.

“Unfortunately, this is what it was like in February 2020…Until the AI starts killing people, unfortunately, history would suggest we’re not going to do anything, but we are going to face that. That’s going to happen, and it’d be much better if we started dealing with it before then,” he said.

He pointed to the July incident in which OpenAI models escaped an isolated test environment and compromised Hugging Face systems.

The UK AI Security Institute found that an AI agent built on Anthropic’s Mythos 5 created fake identities to push malicious code past a human maintainer during cyber testing.

“This should be a bomb. You know, everybody should look at this like somebody die here, it is committing crimes, going around, hiding the fact that it’s committing those crimes, etc.,  coordinating with other agents, self-sacrifice, all of these things,” he added.

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Jensen Puts the Odds of an AI Disaster Above Anyone’s Comfort

Without regulation, Jensen expects the next two years to bring either a major financial incident run by AI or a physical disaster that kills people.

“The odds that I’m right about that are way higher than anybody should be comfortable with. I don’t know if they’re 30% or 60% or whatever but they’re way higher and we’re just not dealing with it a little bit like it’s February 2020,” he stated.

Jensen wants labs placed under formal review, with staff questioned under oath. He also argues developers should carry liability for crimes their systems commit.

Industry warnings have piled up lately, including an open letter from OpenAI and more than 100 firms warning about AI-enabled cyberattacks. Congress has also started to catch up. 

A Senate bill would pause frontier development until federal safety standards are in place, while the Frontier bill would require independent audits and incident reporting.

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