Link: https://www.democracynow.org/2026/10/1/timnit_gebru_ai

Democracy Now interviews the prominent AI researcher and leading critic of the AI industry, Timnit Gebru, who was recently awarded a 2026 Right Livelihood Award for her work investigating the harms and hype behind the global buildup of artificial intelligence. “Instead of discussing faulty, unreliable systems,” Gebru says tech leaders like SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are “marketing their systems as all-knowing, superpowerful, superintelligent,” and lobbying for “self-policing and self-regulation” to avoid being held “liable through existing laws.” Gebru expresses skepticism over increasingly widespread claims that AI algorithms pose an existential risk to humanity, warning that such claims are overblown and that “what is actually happening is regulatory capture.”

The CxOs of all "AI" companies should be held personally liable for what their LLMs and harnesses do. Just like car manufacturers should be held liable if brakes fail on a line of cars. There is no 'rogue' "AI", only rogue "AI" companies and executives and guardrail programmers.

These are not the actions of honest men

I couldnt listen to the whole interview. The beginning seems to feed into the delusion that these models act on their own. Which I cannot abide. These are still applications, and they do what their owners intend them to do. They do not 'go rogue'

Hear hear! We can't let ignorance absolve the wrongs of the people steering these ships.

Maybe you’re misunderstanding—you’re saying exactly what the interviewee says:

TIMNIT GEBRU: Well, so, you know, I have been warning that this kind of discussion about the fictional superintelligent machines that don’t exist and the so-called existential risks that they pose has been a ploy for regulatory capture. And I feel like when I saw this meeting announced, with self-policing and self-regulation and relying on the goodwill of these companies to self-regulate, and I — my first thought was that they got what they wanted. You know, this is what they wanted, instead of being held liable through existing laws