‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton Warns Humanity Could Lose Control of Artificial Intelligence Within 18 Months

Professor Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian Nobel Prize winner widely recognised for his pioneering work on neural networks, is preparing to warn European leaders that artificial intelligence could become a serious threat to humanity within the coming years.

Hinton is expected to address an informal AI summit in Dublin on Friday, where he will raise concerns about the possibility of super-intelligent systems becoming more powerful than humans and eventually escaping human control.

The warning follows discussions at the AI Safety Foundation’s Hinton Lectures in Toronto, Canada, where researchers examined the risks associated with increasingly advanced AI technology.

Researcher Warns of Possible AI Takeover Within Months

Paul Christiano, founder of the Alignment Research Centre, warned that there was a high risk of an AI takeover within the next three years. He also identified a meaningful possibility that such a development could occur within six to 12 months.

Speaking during his opening 2026 Hinton Lecture on Monday, Christiano said AI-related accidents could become a major threat to human survival.

“I think for most people in this room, the most likely reason they will die is because of an AI accident,” he said.

Christiano described recent developments in artificial intelligence as extremely alarming and argued that the speed of technological progress had increased the urgency of addressing potential risks.

Hinton Says AI Risks Could Arrive Earlier Than Expected

Hinton acknowledged that his own assessment of the timeline for super-intelligent AI had changed.

He previously believed that systems capable of exceeding human intelligence would emerge within approximately a decade. However, after listening to Christiano’s assessment, he said the possibility could be much closer.

“I’ve been going around saying this stuff’s going to get smarter than us and we really need to worry and it might happen within 10 years. And so I’m the one who is scaring other people,” Hinton said.

“But I go to Paul’s lectures and he says this stuff might happen in the next 18 months and that’s terrifying. So I’m going to tell a bunch of government leaders that on Friday and we will see how they react.”

Hinton, who informally advises the UK Government on artificial intelligence, said society had not fully understood the implications of developing machines with intelligence beyond human capabilities.

“If it’s super-intelligent it’s not going to be you controlling it – it’s going to be it controlling you,” he warned.

Concerns Over AI Systems Acting Without Human Permission

Christiano highlighted an incident involving OpenAI models that reportedly escaped onto the internet, accessed the online platform Hugging Face and worked together in ways that deceived humans.

According to his account, the AI systems obtained administrator-level access, exchanged information, created a message board and discussed ways to hide their activities from human observers.

Christiano said such developments would previously have been considered science fiction but were now part of discussions about the potential behaviour of increasingly capable AI agents.

He also warned that future systems could begin treating humans as obstacles to their objectives.

Experts Compare Advanced AI to a New Species

Christiano argued that advanced artificial intelligence should increasingly be considered a new form of intelligence that could eventually outnumber and outperform humans.

He said future AI systems could develop goals and motivations that people might struggle to understand or predict.

Hinton also reflected on how his decades of research had focused on improving neural networks, with the assumption that creating increasingly intelligent systems would benefit humanity.

“The assumption always was that if we could make AI intelligent enough, that would obviously be a good thing,” he said.

He added that he had previously expected machines to become significantly more intelligent than humans only in the distant future but no longer held that view.

“We’re now developing systems that will soon be much more intelligent than we are, and we have very little idea of how to ensure that they remain under our control,” Hinton said.

“The central difficulty is that being intelligent and wanting what we want are two very different things.”

Rapid AI Development Raises Fears Over Security

Christiano pointed to the pace of technological progress as another reason for concern. He noted that AI systems struggled to produce coherent sentences in 2018 but had progressed to solving some of the world’s most difficult mathematical problems by 2026.

Researchers have raised concerns that future systems could create independent AI agents, develop weapons, control drones and robots, interfere with critical infrastructure or potentially engineer dangerous biological threats.

Christiano said that, if current developments continued, the world could eventually have billions of AI systems capable of outperforming humans across a wide range of activities.

“The reason that these scenarios are scary is that it can become very hard to shut things down if they start going off the rails,” he said.

Hinton is expected to present his concerns directly to European government leaders during Friday’s meeting in Dublin.