The Doomsday Hour is approaching midnight. Artificial intelligence is a big reason for this

“There is no shortage of explanations for why the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was quoted metaphorically.”Doomsday Clock” rose by 4 seconds on Tuesday to 85 seconds as of midnight. For example, world leaders are speaking out about a test and Use nuclear weapons, and the United States faces the threat of climate change caused by fossil fuels Even less serious Than I did last year.

But underlying all the existential threats we have created for ourselves is a lack of cooperation, which has become much worse due to the acceleration of artificial intelligence Deep fakes And the erosion of trust in information systems.

“AI is an important and accelerating disruptive technology,” Daniel Holz, chair of the Doomsday Clock’s Science and Security Council and a professor of physics at the University of Chicago, said during the conference. advertisement. “AI is also fueling misinformation and disinformation, making it more difficult to address all the other threats we consider. But instead of working toward international standards governing AI safety, we are quickly running into an AI arms race with what could have disastrous consequences.”

Read more: AI-powered impersonation is emerging as one of the top cyber threats of 2026

Artificial intelligence and social media contribute to what journalists do and Nobel Peace Prize Recipient Maria Ressa called it an “information Armageddon.” In the absence of trustworthy information, we lack the “shared reality” needed to confront existential threats such as climate change and nuclear weapons. Generative AI allows the creation of disinformation at almost no cost and in large quantities, along with increasingly convincing scams.

“Information integrity is the mother of all paradigms, because you cannot run democracy on a corrupt operating system,” Ressa said.

And this isn’t the only warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence in the past week. Pope Leo XIV, in A message Ahead of World Social Connections Day, he raised concerns about people giving up their ability to think and communicate with artificial intelligence systems.

“By imitating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, awareness and responsibility, empathy and friendship, the systems known as artificial intelligence not only intersect with information ecosystems, but also encroach on the deepest level of communication, that of human relations,” the Pope wrote.

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There were similar concerns in the minds of some AI creators. Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of AI company Anthropic, published an article Long blog post About the risks and opportunities presented by increasingly powerful AI systems. He highlighted the risks of AI autonomy, misuse, and economic disruption – if the technology puts large numbers of people out of work.

“Humanity is about to be granted almost unimaginable power, and it is not entirely clear whether our social, political, and technological systems have the maturity to use it,” Amodei wrote.

Despite the doom and gloom of the name “Doomsday Clock,” experts who spoke in the bulletin announcement said the goal was to highlight opportunities to avoid the worst-case scenario. “This is a fundamentally optimistic exercise,” Holz said. “The whole point of this is that there are ways to turn back the clock.”

Alexandra Bell, president and CEO of the publication, said the clock represents man-made threats, and people can fix them. Bell encouraged people to seek accurate information about things like climate change, nuclear weapons, and artificial intelligence, and to push politicians and others with power to fix things.

“Every time we have been able to turn back the clock, it has been because there are scientists and experts working to find solutions and a public demanding action,” Bell said.