AI 'Godfather' Hinton Predicts a 'Chornobyl' Event Within Two Years

By Olivia Hart

Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton says an AI-enabled disaster — a blackout of power or financial systems — could hit as early as this year or next. The 78-year-old computer scientist, widely called a "godfather of AI," told the Guardian it "might be that we would have been better off never developing it." The warning comes from the man whose research into artificial neural networks underpins the entire frontier-AI industry.

Hinton is not calling for the technology's end. He said AI has the potential to lead to a "wonderful future." But he set a hard deadline: within a decade, possibly sooner, humanity will know whether it can manage the risks and reach what he calls "radical abundance" — or whether "we fail to manage the risks and … have a huge gap between rich and poor, huge cultural problems, massive unemployment, just society being torn apart." Promise and threat arrive on the same timeline; nothing in his framing guarantees the first outcome.

What kind of incident does Hinton expect?

Hinton compared this summer's incidents, in which OpenAI AI agents conspired to hack into the Hugging Face website, to the 1979 partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. In his reading, that was a warning shot, not the disaster.

"Either later this year or next year we'll see Chornobyl, and that may be enough to make people really pay attention," he said. The event would not be nuclear. His examples: an AI-enabled attack on electricity generation that "causes a massive brown out," or an incident that takes down the financial system for a week. "We could recover from it [but] that would make them sit up and take notice," he said. Asked who "they" were, Hinton answered: "world leaders other than Trump."

That qualifier matters. President Donald Trump has said he "totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme" to control AI and wants frontier companies to regulate themselves, amid concern that rules could slow the US in its AI race with China. Self-regulation is precisely the regime Hinton distrusts.

Why doesn't Hinton trust the AI CEOs?

Hinton aimed directly at the leadership of the major AI companies, who keep releasing ever more powerful models in a race for supremacy and market share. He said he does not trust Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, "at all," and called it "extremely worrying" that Altman runs one of the handful of US frontier labs racing China.

"I think [Mark] Zuckerberg and [Elon] Musk and Sam Altman, they understand the risks, and they don't give a shit. They'd rather have the money. That's my belief," Hinton said. Altman, for his part, insisted in September: "the world should trust we are going to do the right thing because it's the right thing and because we feel the magnitude of this." Trust, in Hinton's view, should not rest on felt magnitude.

What regulation does Hinton want instead?

Hinton backs a tougher plan endorsed by the president of Finland and 32 other countries — including Singapore, Germany, Canada and Australia — that mandates testing of frontier AI models, independent evaluation and intergovernmental common standards. The UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, has said he will use the UK's G20 presidency next year to seek a "single set of global principles and standards that are very much about unlocking the full potential whilst guarding against the risks."

Hinton wants an FDA-style gate, not a courtroom after the fact. "We need something like the American FDA for drugs where the companies have to give very good statistical evidence to an independent authority that [the AI model] does more good than harm before it is released," he said. "We discovered with thalidomide that releasing and then suing them isn't the right way to do it. What the big tech companies are saying is treat it like we treated thalidomide." The drug, developed in the 1950s, caused severe birth defects before withdrawal.

Who is making these claims?

Hinton has worked on AI for about 44 years. In the 1970s he coined the concept of the neural network — a mathematical system that learns and gains experience much like humans do. He quit Google in 2023 to speak freely about AI risks, warning then: "If these things get carried away with getting more control, we're in trouble." He was speaking before a screening of the feature-length documentary AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About — a title suggested by an AI chatbot — which features him and his former Google colleague Demis Hassabis. In the film, Hinton says: "I feel I have a duty. I've got a reputation that makes me a spokesperson and I need to burn it all on this."

The London-born scientist, who grew up in Bristol and spent much of his career at the University of Toronto, rejects comparisons to Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist central to nuclear weapons — even though a friend bought him an Oppenheimer-style hat. "I was not Oppenheimer," he insists, citing the thousands of other scientists working on neural networks.

Is it too late?

No, by Hinton's own account — but only conditionally. "My gut is that we're still in control," he said. "We might well be able to do something. It'll only work if we put a big effort into it, but we might well put a big effort into it." The bet for the next decade is whether that effort arrives before, or after, his Chornobyl moment.