‘World is going to be alright’: Palantir's Joe Lonsdale dismisses threat from AI amid warnings from industry leaders

“The world is going to be alright,” the Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale said, brushing aside rising fears about artificial intelligence risks after an Anthropic engineer warned that AI insiders believe the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

"The world is going to be alright, guys," Lonsdale said in an X post. “Leaders have big responsibilities and challenges ahead, but it doesn't help to scare everyone. We are on top of it.”

Anthropic whistleblower Jacob Coxon quit the company last week and claimed that frontier AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.”

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger,” Coxon wrote in one of his tweets after resigning.

Dario Amodei's blog post

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in a blog post, advocated for a slower pace of AI advancement to mitigate the risks of building dangerous technology.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” Amodei wrote in the essay.

He said AI is advancing rapidly due to its “growing ability to build the next generation of AI,” warning: “Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.”

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue all said they agreed with Amodei.

Joe Lonsdale disagrees

Lonsdale, a famously conservative contrarian, founded the University of Austin in 2021 alongside now-CBS News editor Bari Weiss, which counts "the unhindered pursuit of truth without cancel culture" as one of its core principles.

"It's not as much about the politics as it was about being contrarian. I've always relished standing out from the crowd, standing up and disagreeing with everyone," Lonsdale told Business Insider in a 2017 interview.

Palantir builds AI software that helps governments and corporations analyze large amounts of data. The company reportedly has several lucrative contracts with the US government.

Lonsdale's opinion on rapidly growing AI and its alleged threat echoes US President Donald Trump's view that the US needs to stay ahead of China in the AI race. In Ireland on Sunday, Trump said, “Whoever wins with AI wins.”