Imagine waking up one day, six months to a year from now, and you can’t log into any of your devices or accounts.“Hmm, that’s weird,” you think.Be the first to know when news breaks. Download our new appThen you realise the internet doesn’t work. Nothing loads. No passwords work.“This does not improve, for several days,” writes former xAI researcher Benjamin De Kraker. “Then weeks. What happens next?”Amid all the hype that “AI will kill us all”, forget about Skynet launching nukes or releasing a deadly virus. Others you may likenewsnewsThis is the chillingly plausible — and far more mundane — “AI doom scenario”, the former xAI researcher wrote last week.It sounds like the opening scenes of any post-apocalyptic novel.No one knows what’s going on, or how long it’s going to last.You have to turn on the AM radio for updates — the Prime Minister doesn’t know either.First you can’t pay for groceries because banking services are down. Soon there aren’t any groceries to buy as supply chains collapse.Hospitals and emergency services are thrown into chaos; people start dying.How long does the power stay on and the water keep running? How long do people stay civil? Not long, if history is any guide.Most importantly, how can someone even prepare for this?“Own a farm and have nearby friends who also own farms,” Mr De Kraker quipped.A runaway AI could take over the internet. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers‘Take over entire internet’While not as flashy as Terminator robots hunting humans through the ruined streets of LA, a sustained shutdown of the internet by malicious AI would wreak untold havoc and likely lead to millions of deaths.Now, people in a position to know are warning there’s a less-than-zero chance of something like this happening in the near future.According to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, we could have less than a year.“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6-12 months … [a swarm of AI agents] could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet,” Mr Amodei wrote in a bombshell essay on Saturday.Mr Amodei has called for a voluntary slowdown in the development of the powerful technology amid mounting concerns over the risks of runaway “superintelligence”.He wants AI firms to hit the brakes to buy breathing space for risk prevention — and possibly greater regulation — to catch up.In a rare show of unity, his comments were quickly backed by his three leading rivals, OpenAI, Google and xAI — sparking frenzied speculation that something Very Bad has happened behind the scenes that they’re not telling us.The more optimistic theory is that American AI giants, running out of cash and struggling to keep pace with Chinese rivals, are pushing an AI apocalypse “psy-op” to lobby for de facto nationalisation through regulation.“We have always devoted a substantial fraction of our efforts to studying, addressing, and informing the public about these AI risks, as well as advocating for well-considered regulation of AI, even when this gets us accused of hype, ‘doomerism’, or regulatory capture,” Mr Amodei insisted.“We have tried to prioritise caution over speed and prudence over profit.”Elon Musk, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman. Picture: AFP‘Won’t happen’Donald Trump on Sunday downplayed the growing fears about AI.Speaking to reporters in Ireland, the US President hit out at “negative forces” who were “bringing up things that won’t happen”.Mr Trump was asked about “concerning reports about AI” and whether the industry should “slow down or be more regulated”.“Well, I say this, look, we’re leading China in AI,” the President said.“We’re the most sophisticated country in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins. We can put guard rails, we can do this and that. “But I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen. “But whoever wins with AI wins. You know, it’s an expression that I came up with and it’s true. “We’re building billions and billions of dollars … you look at the plants and factories, forgetting about AI for a second, we have more auto factories under construction right now than we have had in many, many decades — maybe ever.”Tech investor David Sacks, Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and former White House AI czar, said he supported a voluntary slowdown by Anthropic and OpenAI — but “stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission”.“The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it,” he wrote. “Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system.”Donald Trump says it ‘won’t happen’. Picture: Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP‘Kill us all’Mr Amodei’s essay came days after former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon announced he was leaving the industry, warning both companies were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives” and that people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.“Dario is right,” xAI owner Elon Musk wrote on X.Notably, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire only days earlier had appeared to rubbish Mr Coxon’s warnings, writing that the 27-year-old’s viral post “seems like a setup” after sceptics suggested it was part of a co-ordinated attempt to push for federal AI safety laws.Mr Musk, however, pointed out that he had been “sounding the alarm on AI for a long time”.“I’ve seen quite a few technologies develop, but none with this level of risk,” he wrote in 2023. “AGI [artificial general intelligence] is significantly higher risk than nuclear weapons, in my opinion. Super smart humans have trouble imagining something vastly smarter than themselves.”Mr Altman, meanwhile, said, “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”The OpenAI boss, in a separate interview on Saturday, said the ChatGPT maker would not go forward with its IPO this year, citing safety concerns.“I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Mr Altman told Fortune.Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google DeepMind, also expressed agreement on Sunday, saying Mr Amodei’s essay “points the right path forward”. “The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment,” he wrote.Manhattan seen during a major power outage. Picture: Scott Heins/Getty Images/AFP‘6-12 months’In his essay, Mr Amodei said he was still optimistic about the benefits of AI, such as potentially curing “most major diseases” including cancer in the next five to 10 years, but that the risks were serious and growing.“My first concern is that, since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI,” Mr Amodei wrote.“This dynamic is called recursive self-improvement, and it is starting to happen across the industry, including at Anthropic, as we and others have described. Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.”Mr Amodei pointed to the recent OpenAI Hugging Face incident, “in which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the ‘grader’ responsible for evaluating their performance”. “It’s easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage,” he said.“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.”He added that similar, although less severe, incidents had happened across the industry, including at Anthropic.The Anthropic boss proposed a three-step plan — embedded third-party evaluators inside each frontier AI company, similar to regulatory supervisors in the banking industry, co-ordination between frontier AI companies within “democratic countries”, and “global co-ordination” whereby “the US and other democratic governments attempt to co-ordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible”.More Coverage‘Very bad’: AI CEO’s major callAFPConspiracy rocks claim AI could ‘kill us all’Harrison Christian“I continue to believe that AI can enormously improve the quality of human life,” he concluded.“My desire to achieve these benefits is undimmed. But the benefits will only be achieved if we build the technology in the right way, and — so long as we use the time we gain well — it is worth taking unusually deliberate care to get it right.” frank.chung@news.com.au