The AI safety debate is confusing. Here's our guide to the different factions

A guide to the different factions in the AI safety debate The battle over AI's promise and perils is not a clash between two opposing sides, but a debate among a range of competing voices and ideologies. Here is a guide to who's who in that debate.

Clockwise from top left: former Google AI research scientist Timnit Gebru, Anthropic Co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, Steve Bannon, computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton, researcher Fei-Fei Li.

The debate over the potential benefits and safety risks of accelerating artificial intelligence development reached a crescendo this month, as supporters and critics of the technology clashed over warnings that increasingly powerful AI could pose existential risks to humanity.

On September 8, Jacob Coxon, a researcher-turned-whistleblower, publicly resigned from major AI firm Anthropic after a previous stint at OpenAI, accusing the companies of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

Are big AI companies gambling with our lives?

Coxon's claims supercharged an ongoing debate over the potential damage AI could wreak on society and prompted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other AI CEOs to call for a slowdown in AI development .

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