Hinton warns: A Chernobyl-level AI incident could occur this year or next

Nobel laureate and "godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton warned in an interview with the UK's The Guardian that a Chernobyl-level incident in the field of artificial intelligence could occur this year or next. He compared this summer's incident in which an OpenAI agent breached Hugging Face to a Three Mile Island-style "warning," and said a more serious scenario could be an AI attack causing a large-scale blackout or a week-long paralysis of the financial system. He supports mandatory testing, independent evaluation, and the development of common intergovernmental standards for frontier AI.