A small but dedicated group of AI experts has been warning for years that increasingly powerful AI systems could cause catastrophic damage or even lead to human extinction. Now, an explosion of interest worldwide has magnified long-simmering questions about how exactly an AI doomsday scenario could materialize. In interviews, AI researchers, analysts studying the intersection of AI and the military, and biologists studying AI-mediated risks said that worries about the technology’s growing capabilities are not the stuff of science fiction. Instead, they said, humans acting alone or with state support could soon use AI systems to cause potentially catastrophic harm. AI safety researchers also predict that self-improving AI systems — which AI leaders say could emerge in the coming years — could coordinate complex influence campaigns to gain control of military systems and execute a coup against human governments. And those are just the scenarios experts can currently envision. Peter Barnett, a technical AI researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a California-based nonprofit dedicated to preventing human extinction from artificial superintelligence, said “there …